


To Face the Demons

by wolfinred (clare_dragonfly)



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Alternate Canon, Community: cm_bigbang, Demonic Possession, Episode: s04e17 Demonology, F/M, Flashbacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-11 19:09:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/481882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clare_dragonfly/pseuds/wolfinred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Emily's old friend, Matthew Benton, is killed, she suspects foul play. She and the team catch the killer, Father Paul Silvano, and have him sent out of the country. But when he tells them they've just made the world a more dangerous place, he's telling the truth. Soon more murders, even stranger ones, are appearing on the BAU's radar, and John Cooley is hanging around a lot more. (AU/tag to 4x17 "Demonology.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to ariestess for both inspiring part of the story and doing a great beta!
> 
> Be sure to check out [the awesome art](http://hack-benjamin22.livejournal.com/80112.html).
> 
> This story includes slight, blink-and-you'll-miss-them spoilers for Emily's arc in season 6.

_It hurts!_

_Ah, master, it hurts!_

But he believes he can bear it on his own. He is stronger than those he brought with him in Spain. He is older and more powerful.

But how strong is this priest, this Silvano? He has performed three exorcisms in as many weeks. He has been unable to throw out the demons without killing the hosts, but perhaps that, too, is a manifestation of his strength and skill.

And he does not want to lose this fine host, to which he has become so well accustomed. So he fights and thrashes and yells.

Then he hears the sweet sound, the voice calling. His Emily. She has come to save him, just as he hoped she would.

He sends a last message to his master while the pain is still ripping through him, body and soul, for that is the best way to get information to his master. His influence over Emily is confirmed, he says. She trusts him. He can bring her into the fold. He will have time while he is in this land, performing the duty to which he has been assigned.

Then he succumbs to the pain, lets it take over and hide the satisfaction he feels, while she soothes him and loves him and frees him from his bonds.

She wraps him in a blanket, and he lets her, though he no longer feels cold. He feels suffused with the fire of his home, and he knows his master approves. The body, though, is shivering slightly, and its nose is bleeding. He doesn’t know much about human medicine, but he knows enough to keep his host alive.

Emily is talking about the hospital, though, and he doesn’t want that. “No. You got here in plenty of time.”

She shakes her head. “At least let them look at you. Your body has been working hard.”

He sighs as they step out of the house. “Emily, come on, I’m fine.”

“No, look at you.” She’s clinging to his arm. “Stress can tear your body apart. That’s what happened to Matthew.”

She has a point. He lets her guide him toward the ambulances and pauses to look into her eyes and read her emotions. They’re a jumble, naturally, but he has practice at this and finds fear, anxiety, a great deal of anger, and a tiny little ball of hurt. That tells him what he needs to say. “Emily, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.” He sighs, as though sad. “In Italy.” He lets the sentence dangle there—she knows what he’s saying, and he doesn’t have to explain. He got her pregnant and then he didn’t help her when she wanted an abortion. And he is sorry, a little; he hadn’t thought she’d go through with the abortion, and he wanted to distance himself from any child until it grew enough to see whether it had inherited its father’s body or his soul.

He is rewarded when her eyes soften and the hurt dissipates. “Okay,” she says. “Just let them do their job.”

He leans into her on an instinct he couldn’t explain and kisses her cheek lightly. Maybe he can remind her of what things were like when she was fifteen. He’d enjoy that. “Goodbye.”

He steps into the ambulance, and is gratified to hear her call after him, “I’ll check on you later!”

He is silent as he lets the men check his vital signs, and when they suggest he go to the hospital for fluids and rest, he reluctantly agrees. He needs to keep this body healthy, and it’s not a Catholic hospital. He’ll be safe enough there.

And Emily will come to see him.

***

Father Paul Silvano has been relieved of duty. He is still a priest—they will not take that away from him—but he no longer has a ministry. He has been encouraged to pray alone and follow God’s guidance.

He will pray, but he already knows God’s will. He has been frustrated, but he will try another way.

His superiors do not all agree with him. Some do not believe in demonic possession, whatever their professions to follow the will of God and of the Vatican. Some believe, but do not agree that Paul was performing true exorcisms. Some do. Cardinal Martello gave him a look that he could not misinterpret. Perhaps those who believe are a small faction, but they will not allow their belief to be crushed.

He sits alone in his cell and fasts and prays for a full day. He feels cleansed afterward, though he had not felt dirty. The power of his God is great, he knows, but He asks His priests to help Him on earth. Father Paul knows that.

He begins to write letters to priests in America. He has no friends there, but perhaps he can make some.

He starts with Washington, DC. Because there are still demons there. And he cannot rest until he has done everything he can to destroy them.

***

Emily walks off her pain and her fear, and then she feels lighter. She’s done right by Matthew. Maybe it’s not the justice he deserves, but she has hope that the Vatican will deal with Silvano. Priests aren’t supposed to kill people, whether they think they’re doing the will of God or not. His superiors aren’t going to be happy.

She goes into a coffee shop and sips a latte—she doesn’t normally indulge in this much sugar, but after the day she’s had, she thinks she deserves it—until she warms up a little and her nosebleed fades. The barista gives her a concerned look but doesn’t ask, and the shop is otherwise empty but for a couple of students working hard on finals, for which Emily is grateful.

She cleans her face off before heading to the hospital. Matthew is the boy she loved and could never have; John is the one she didn’t know she wanted until she had him. They hadn’t kept in touch much over the last twenty years, but that, she thinks now, was a mistake. She’s missed him. It took a friend’s death to bring them back together, but that’s her life, isn’t it?

She asks at the front desk and is relieved to find that a John Cooley is indeed checked in. She was afraid he would refuse. When she finds him, he looks all right, though his breathing is shallow and there’s still a little blood on his nose. She takes a tissue from the table by the bed, dampens it at the sink, and wipes off his nose before she says anything. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” he says, shrugging irritably—but not moving enough to dislodge the IV in his arm. “Apparently I’m dehydrated. They want to keep me overnight for observation.”

She nods. “That’s probably wise. No signs of any poison from that holy water?” The word ‘holy’ comes out bitter and sarcastic. It’s not something she can remember believing in, and she certainly doesn’t now.

He shakes his head. She looks around, finds a trash can, tosses the tissue, then pulls a chair up to the side of the bed. “Have you called anybody? Do you want me to?”

“No, no.” He sniffs, but his nose doesn’t seem to be bleeding anymore. “Mom and Dad both passed years ago. There’s no one else. Not right now, anyway.” He looks up at her through his lashes. He looks so much like himself at sixteen in Italy, even though they’ve both aged twenty years, that she has to smile.

“Well, I’ll be here for you. As long as you need.” She takes a breath, shifts in the chair, thinking they’ve got to talk about something else.

He beats her to it. “Do you know why that priest was… after us? Me?”

She nods and swallows, then tells him about the death of Father del Toro in Galicia. “Apparently Father Silvano thought Matthew and his friends had killed him, and wanted to exorcise them. I’m really not sure if he intended to kill them or not.” She’d thought so at first, but remembering his expression when they’d sent him back to Italy, she wasn’t so sure. And he’d been in a psychotic break. “He believed that anyone who had contact with Matthew opened themselves up to demonic influence. That’s how I knew he would come after you.”

She doesn’t ask John why he lied about speaking to Matthew’s parents, though it troubles her. And he doesn’t seem surprised by her explanation. Maybe Matthew already told him about Galicia.

“So what are you doing these days?” she asks, determined to change the subject, move to something lighter. “You obviously didn’t make it with that punk band you were going to start.”

He laughs, as she’d hoped. “Oh, those were the days, weren’t they? We were so young and idealistic.”

“I wasn’t.”

“No, you weren’t.” He fixes her with a strangely cool, measuring gaze. “You never had much ambition. Where did that come from?”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to discuss her history with Interpol. “It wasn’t ambition, really, that got me here. You know how I feel about politics.”

“Absolutely,” he agrees. He feels the same way, too. All her embassy friends did—though perhaps not so strongly as before. One of her stressors in Rome (she uses the profiling term automatically, not giving it a single thought) was watching the breakdown of her parents’ marriage begin, and knowing—or believing—it was all due to her mother’s ambition.

“Well, I thought I’d just go into law enforcement. At first it was just something to do—those were the most interesting classes when I was in college—but it grew.” She shrugs, a bit surprised at herself for pouring her heart out to someone she’s hardly spoken to in twenty years. But he’s an old friend, after all. She’s never explained any of this to the team—but they’ve never asked. None of them have any reason to question what brought her to the BAU. “I guess I just love ridding the world of unsubs—bad guys. I like helping people.”

He smiles. “You always were soft-hearted, Emily.”

She laughs. “Is that what you think of me?”

He reaches out and puts his hand lightly over hers where it’s resting on the rail of his bed. “I mean it in the best possible way.”

She looks down at their joined hands and wonders why she’s not pulling away. Then she does, but gently, as she says, “You never answered my question.”

“Oh. Well, I feel like I’m not doing much. I work part-time as a janitor at the university. Mostly I live off my inheritance.”

“I’m sorry about your parents.” She doesn’t ask how they died. There’s a pause, then she decides she’d better get out of here. Get some sleep. She seems to have metabolized that coffee awfully quickly.

She stands. “Call me if you need me. You still have my number, right?”

He smiles up at her. “Of course.”

“Right.” She nods. “Maybe we can have coffee sometime.” She pauses, wondering if he’ll construe that as more of an invitation than she intended, wondering what exactly she did intend. Maybe she should offer something more. Then she shakes off her hesitation. “If you’re not out of the hospital tomorrow, if they find something more, definitely call me.”

“I will. And you take care of yourself, Emily.”

“Thanks. I will.” She hurries out of there, pulling her coat tightly around herself.

When she gets home, she doesn’t sleep for some time. She just watches television and thinks about the genuine blessing Father Silvano offered her.


	2. Chapter 2

_The group of them sit together in secret, five teenagers and one demon in a teenage body. There’s an abandoned hotel they spend their time in, close enough to the embassy that they can get home easily, far enough away that their parents can’t find them if they start looking. It’s ancient, dusty, redolent with the ghosts of the nineteenth century. They smoke cigarettes and pass joints around._

_Today he is thinking about introducing them to harder drugs. There’s a baggie of cocaine in his pocket, ready for sharing. But there are other things that distract him as well._

_She’s fifteen years old, slender and pale and so earnest as she gestures with her cigarette, smoke trailing from her fingers in a way that is all the more beautiful for the fact that she doesn’t know it is and would laugh at him if he tried to tell her. Emily Prentiss, the Ambassador’s daughter herself. Quite a coup, except that he didn’t have to work very hard. She would have done anything to get away._

_Anything, he muses, and shifts as he laughs at whatever she’s saying, rests his hand lightly on her knee. She smiles at him and he smiles back._

_Later, he lights her cigarette for her. He brushes the hair out of her face. She gazes at him with large, liquid eyes._

_Matthew is staring at them from behind their backs, and he doesn’t know which of them he is jealous of. But he shifts himself to more clearly exclude the other boy. Let the jealousy eat away at his soul._

_The next day at the embassy school Emily and John sit together. He passes her a note that says he has something special to show them tonight. Gives her the knowledge first. Makes her feel special._

_He’s patient. He takes his time._

***

Emily returns to work the next day. Hotch and Rossi both give her skeptical looks, but she just smiles at them. Yes, she feels a little bit run down, but sitting at home and itching between her ears won’t help. Maybe all there is to do here is paperwork—though the Silvano case produced surprisingly little—but it’s better than watching television, and it’s definitely better than being alone.

She needs the presence of new friends to make up for the lack of old ones.

They go to Washington state to solve the kidnapping of a three-year-old boy. They find him. They come home. She’s walking in the door of her apartment laden with a go-bag filled with dirty laundry when her cell phone starts beeping.

She drops her bags, slams the door shut with her hip, and snatches at the phone, a small pit of dread in her stomach. “Prentiss.”

“Emily?” It’s John Cooley, and she sighs and leans back against the door, eyes closed.

“Sorry, did I scare you?” he asks.

“It’s just been a long day. I just now got back from a case.”

“Oh. I guess that means you don’t want to follow up on that offer of coffee. I’ll buy.”

“I would, actually.” She glances guiltily down at her go-bag. Well, laundry can wait. If she does get called away in the middle of her coffee, she can always re-pack. Ninety percent of her wardrobe was designed to not wrinkle anyway. But a break to have coffee with an old friend? Yes, that sounds wonderful.

“Oh, great, then!” He sounds surprised and pleased. “There’s a nice place just a mile from me, unless you have a better idea.” He names a coffee shop she’s been to before, a nice, quiet one with decent coffee and no music or poetry readings.

“That sounds perfect. Give me half an hour?”

“Sure. Take as long as you need.”

He’s waiting there when she arrives, and she has to wonder how long he’s been waiting; from the brief glimpse she gives his cup, at least half his coffee is gone. It’s been wet, though there doesn’t seem to have been any snow since the day he was attacked, so she hangs her damp coat on the back of a chair and greets John before ordering her drink. After thinking briefly, she orders mint tea and a scone—she’s not in the mood for caffeine, really.

“So how have you been?” she asks, sitting down with it. “You look much better than the last time I saw you, but I guess that’s not saying much.”

He smiles. “They let me out of the hospital, so I must be okay. It’s strange. I feel like something’s changed… not just Matthew’s death, but as though I’m different, after that exorcism.”

She grins over her mug of tea, letting the sweet scent relax her. “You don’t think there was really a demon there, do you?”

His answering laugh is a little slow. “If there was, I don’t think Silvano could have done anything about it. What’s going to happen to him, anyway?”

She shakes her head. “I’m not actually sure. He’s been sent back to the Vatican, and they’ll want to reprimand him, but I don’t know exactly what that will entail. And I think I’m happier not knowing.”

“You’re right. I should stop thinking about him.” John rubs his temples and sips his coffee. “It’s hard to get him out of my head.”

“I understand.” She considers taking his hand and doesn’t. “Even for me, with all I’ve seen—when it gets personal like that, it’s hard to forget. The best thing you can do is keep busy. Maybe you should get a hobby.”

He raises his eyebrows and nods slowly. “That’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll go back to music.”

She nods. “You have that whole big house to yourself, you can play the ugliest, screamingest punk you like.”

“Oh, that’s not so much fun without parents to annoy. Maybe I’ll take up the cello.”

“Well, that sounds just lovely.”

There’s a pause while he sips his coffee and she picks at her scone. It’s strange, though she wanted to have contact with him again—perhaps speaking with an old friend is always strange. She doesn’t want to speak about what she did between the time they knew each other and now, she can tell that he doesn’t either. So what else is there? Matthew, or Father Silvano, or when they were teenagers in Rome. None of those are comfortable topics. But she doesn’t want to let go of this friendship again.

“So what was the case about?” he asks.

She’s startled at the question, at first thinking he means Silvano, then wondering why on earth he would want to know about the case she just came back from. “A kidnapped little boy. We found him.”

“Oh, that’s great. Happy ending.”

“Yes.” She nods and sighs. “There aren’t enough of those. I wish I could have gotten there in time for Matthew.”

“So do I,” he says, and he’s looking straight into her eyes for what she realizes is the first time since they’ve sat down together.

There’s something strange about him. Something that feels just slightly dishonest. But she tells herself not to be so paranoid. It’s just that they’ve hardly seen each other in twenty years, and twenty years ago they’d just had a furtive, short-lived relationship that she’d broken off in terror when she found out she was pregnant. She feels awkward. He must, too.

And yet the memory of that relationship is bringing warmth to her cheeks. Perhaps now that they’re both adults it’s time to try it again. She won’t get pregnant this time—or if she does, it will be her choice.

She frowns at herself for thinking that, though the expression on her actual face stays pleasantly neutral, a mode of interaction that she’s perfected, first as an ambassador’s daughter and then as a law enforcement officer. She hasn’t been in a relationship in years, not one that lasted past the second date, and all the reasons for that are the same as they are with John—her unpredictable schedule, her habit of compartmentalization, her memories of Doyle. But then, she thinks, memories of John have been a roadblock as well, and maybe it’s time to face those demons. Why did she agree to meet him if it wasn’t for that? Isn’t having drinks together on a dank DC evening sort of a date?

She hasn’t spoken for several minutes, she realizes, and John seems to be comfortable with that. In fact, he’s smiling. She lets the corners of her mouth turn up, a genuine smile. “I guess it’s true what they say about old friends.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you can sit in silence together, and neither of you minds.”

“I guess that is true. I’d forgotten how much I liked spending time with you, Emily.”

“We should do this again sometime.” She considers, for perhaps longer than she should, inviting him back to her apartment. But not tonight. They should get to know each other better first—she almost laughs at the thought, but it’s true. They knew each other as teens. She wants to get to know him as an adult.

He must have been thinking along the same lines as her, because he says, “What about dinner? I’ll take you out somewhere nice. And we can see a play. You still like Shakespeare, right? I’m sure there’s a showing of one of his plays somewhere in the DC area.”

She smiles more widely. “There must be. Yeah, that sounds great. But don’t get tickets too much ahead of time. You know, my schedule is so unpredictable.”

“Yeah, of course. We’ll go somewhere small and under-appreciated, so we can buy tickets day-of.”

“That sounds perfect.” And yes, she thinks as he stands and tells her goodbye and walks back out into the rain, that will definitely be a date. There’s no mistaking it.

She sips her tea and smiles, thinking that if nothing else, she’ll have something to talk about with JJ and Garcia.

***

_John has a lot of time on his hands when he’s waiting for his next assignment. Of course he does his best to sow discord and hatred wherever he can—writing runes for jealousy on every surface he cleans at the university is a great help—but his master does give him specific jobs to do, and when he doesn’t have one, he gets restless. So he spends a lot of time on the Internet. It’s a lovely place, and naturally, he gravitates toward the haunts of former adherents to structured religions; they are the best places to find new friends. So when he sees a posting by an old friend, he takes a closer look. Matthew Benton. Yes, John remembers him well. One of his dear friends when he was living with his parents at the embassy in Rome. He remembers the drugs, the sex, the breach with the church. John lost track of him after that—his family had moved to France—but here he is again. It’s like a divine gift. Or perhaps an infernal one. He’s looking for support. He’s still struggling with his faith, evidently. Well, John can support him. _Matthew,_ he writes. _It’s great to connect with you again. I am struggling as well. Perhaps we can get together to talk about it. It would be good to find others as well._ His is not the only response. There are many looking for guidance after losing the structure that their parents brought them into at birth. There will be others John can speak to. He is looking for guidance, as well. He goes into his basement and scourges himself until his flesh screams with pain. Then he can speak to his master. He tells him about the support group, about Matthew, so ripe for demonic invasion, with his struggles and his drugs. He asks if this is the right direction, and how he should bring him into the fold. His master approves, filling John with a joyful blackness. The master tells him about a certain priest, a certain pilgrimage. It would be helpful, he says, if the world were rid of this priest, if the pilgrimage were disrupted. “Thy will be done,” says John, before the pain he has just put his body through overwhelms him and he collapses to the floor, unconscious._

***

_Father Paul Silvano walks into his superior’s office and waits to be noticed. He is, almost immediately, and gestured to a seat. Cardinal Martello looks at him over his eyeglasses. “Are you well, Paul?”_

_“Yes, thank you. And you?”_

_“Oh, well enough. These old bones, you know. You might not believe it, but you’re still young.”_

_Paul forces a smile, but does not respond. There is a note of strain in his superior’s voice, and he is waiting to discover why he has been called in._

_Cardinal Martello exhales. “Paul, I’m afraid I have to give you some bad news. I know you were planning to go to Spain to visit the Santiago del Compostela and your friend Father Federico del Toro.”_

_Paul nods. “That’s right. Is there some reason I need to put off the trip?”_

_Cardinal Martello looks straight into his eyes. “I don’t know if you’d want to put it off or cancel it, but Father del Toro is dead.”_

_Paul goes cold all over. He expects to go hot with anger the next moment, but there’s no anger: only fear. “Do you know how?”_

_“They’re saying it was a heart attack. But he was a healthy man. It seems strange.”_

_Paul nods slowly. Yes, it seems very strange. “Thank you, sir,” he says._

_“If you’d like to take some time to mourn your friend, you know you can always do that.”_

_Paul is standing. He doesn’t remember getting to his feet. “I think I will. Thank you, Cardinal Martello.”_

_“You’re welcome, Paul. I’m glad I could deliver the news in person.”_

_Paul’s feet take him to his cell, and then to his desk, where he retrieves Father del Toro’s most recent letter and sits to examine it. He had feared for his life. He knew there were evil forces in Galicia, and he suspected they would try to disrupt the pilgrimage._

_Most other men, most other priests, would have dismissed Federico’s fears as ramblings, madness. But there’s a reason he and Paul have remained friends, a reason beyond the shared bond of the ceremony. They are among the minority of priests who truly believe in demons. Not just illness or madness, but real and malevolent evil that will not rest until it has defeated the entire world._

_Paul takes a deep, shaky breath. He knows that there is no other explanation for Father del Toro’s death. And he knows his duty now._

_He knows that a demon cannot act without a living host. They cannot affect the material world, but they can possess people and animals. Animals are more rare in these times; it is harder to manipulate them in ways that can affect humanity. And people… in these Godless times, people are far easier._

_But Paul knows what to do about people. He is a student of the exorcism rite._

_He will find the demons who killed his friend, and he will destroy them._

***

He lets himself into his grand old-money house, smiling to himself. Things are going very well with Emily. He might even manage to get some fun out of it.

He rolls over her idea of a hobby for him in his mind, mostly to amuse himself. He could, indeed, take up the cello. The neighbors are too far away to complain about the usual beginner’s squawks. And it’s a lovely, sensual instrument. He could probably seduce women with it.

But really, he doesn’t have time for a hobby, and he knows it. He’s come to DC to do a job and he’s been procrastinating on it.

He finds his list and consults it. Five men and women who defied the master. Five men and women who made contracts and broke them. Five men and women who must now die.

He’s acquired a powerful computer, and he searches for the names, finds traces of them wherever they have been. One he is out on the streets he will be able to find them—his powers are limited by this human body, though he can still do a bit more than ordinary humans—but it will help to know where to start looking.

One of the women seems to be the easiest to catch. Her credit card records (he is not himself a hacker, but he has acquired software from one who is) tell him that she breakfasts at the same coffee shop, not the one where he has just been with Emily, every morning. He will meet her there today.

He looks out the window. It is dark. Hours have passed while he was doing his research. He will only have to wait a few more until the woman is having her coffee.

In the interval, he sharpens his knives.

***

Emily gets a call that Friday, just as she’s walking into the parking lot after lunch with JJ and Reid. She waves the two of them ahead and answers, half hoping that it’s be John, half worrying that it is him and he’s upset with her for not calling him, or that it isn’t and she’ll get irrationally upset at whoever it actually is.

But it is John, and he sounds upbeat. “Hey, Emily. Are you free tonight?”

“I am. Ready to fulfill that dinner and Shakespeare promise?” She keeps her tone deliberately light, masking her worry, her nervousness. She recognizes these signs in herself. She has a crush and she wants this date to go well. And John knew her as a goth teen, not as the combination cop/nerd she is now. Then again, she doesn’t mind getting in touch with that part of herself again. Maybe she should try the black eyeliner she used to slather on.

“I’ve got something better than Shakespeare, actually. But that’s great. I’ll pick you up outside your apartment at seven?”

“That sounds perfect.” She’ll have to get out of here earlier than she normally did, but the team will only encourage her in that. “How dressy should I be?”

“Oh, uh, I don’t know. However you would normally dress for the theater. I’m wearing a suit, not a tux.”

She has to smile at his uncertainty, knowing how different men’s and women’s dressy fashions are. “I’ll figure something out. See you at seven.”

Inside, JJ gives her a wide-eyed, questioning look. Emily returns a grin and a thumbs-up.

At home that evening, Emily stands in a bra and underwear, looking through her closet. The one advantage of being an ambassador’s daughter is that when she needs a nice dress, she has one. Half of these were gifts from her mother, but they all fit and look nice. She tries on two dresses in blood-red (normally her favorite color) and one in indigo silk before finally setting on a simple, modest black sheath dress. She pokes through her jewelry, which is a much smaller selection than dresses, and selects a cameo choker. Not something she gets much opportunity to wear these days, but she’s had it for a long time—since she was fifteen, in fact. She tries and fails to remember where she got it.

She is heavy on the eyeliner, but chooses red lipstick over black, a shade that flatters her skin. No need to go full-out goth. Her hair is curled, a style she once wore for work, before she grew uncomfortable with how formal it made her feel—before she grew comfortable enough with her work that she didn’t want to feel formal on the job.

When John comes to her door his eyes go to the choker first thing. He smiles and reaches out, touching the black satin lightly with the tips of his fingers. “Matthew gave you that.”

She smiles back and lets herself feel the tingle that goes through her at John’s touch on her neck without comment. “Did he? I didn’t remember. I’ve always loved it, though.” She’s surprised not to remember a gift from Matthew.

John nods slowly. “Well, you look lovely, as always. Shall we go?”

She nods and steps outside to lock her door, briefly admiring the figure John cuts in a suit. She’s never known him to be much for caring about his appearance, but he cleans up well, despite the thinning hair. The suit is pressed, the shoes are shined. He probably doesn’t wear them too often.

“So,” she says as they take the elevator down to the parking garage, “care to explain what you mean by better than Shakespeare?”

He laughs. “You’ll see. After dinner. It will be a surprise.”

Dinner is lovely, a really nice restaurant—his parents were fashion moguls of some sort and he must be living well on the money they left him—and enjoyable conversation. They seem to have gotten over the initial awkwardness, and talk about books they’ve been reading, movies they’ve seen (not that Emily has seen many lately), and some of John’s student friends at the university where he works. And Rome, of course. It’s never far from either of their minds. Emily, though, to her relief, manages to keep the conversation away from her own work.

After dinner they get back in his car. The air is crisp and cold, no sign of the snow returning, but it doesn’t snow that much in DC, much as Emily might like to see some right now. She tells herself she’s just being a romantic and turns to John with a smile as he navigates the car around a turn. “So are you ready to tell me your surprise yet?”

“If I just told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise,” he says.

He drives her to a part of the city she’s not very familiar with—near a college, she thinks, but not Georgetown, where she spent a good chunk of her life. It’s darker here than in the downtown where she’s just been, and she has a moment of fear and anxiety, wondering if he’s taking her somewhere dangerous. Then she shakes off the irrational feeling. John would never do anything like that to her.

He parks in a lot and takes her arm, leading her. When they round the corner there’s a small but bustling theater. The marquee reads “GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’S PYGMALION.”

Emily gasps involuntarily and squeezes John’s arm. “The play? Really? Not the musical?”

“I checked for you,” he says with a grin, leading her through the door. “They’re really putting on the actual play. They haven’t changed the ending. I know you love Shaw.”

“I do.” She squeezes his arm again. “Thank you, John, this is perfect.”

He’s reserved tickets, and they pick them up at the counter, then go inside. They’re excellent seats—not too close to the stage, not so far that she won’t be able to see the actors’ expressions. She thanks him again and settles down to read the playbill.

The play is excellent. Not perfect, as the actors are students for the most part, but still excellent. She’s flushed with laughter and pleasure as they leave, and thinks as John opens the passenger door for her, _This is the best date I’ve ever been on._ Maybe there had been something to it, them getting together in Rome, other than her desperation.

He drives her to her building and walks her up to her own door. She wavers in her thoughts on the way up, wondering whether to invite him in, but decides no, not yet. So she stops him outside her door—she doesn’t want to mess with the alarm system while he’s still standing there waiting. “Thank you, John. I had a wonderful evening. We should do that more often.”

His smile wakes wrinkles at the edges of his eyes. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Emily, because I’d really like to.” Then he leans in—and she’s considered this possibility, of course she has, she’s considered all of them—and kisses her on the lips. It’s a gentle kiss, lips closed, but somehow unchaste. Maybe it’s just her memory of their bodies. But he kisses her, and she kisses him back, and they’re still close to the same height, just like when they were teenagers.

And that’s all. He says good night and leaves. She watches him until he presses the elevator button, then quickly turns and lets herself inside, not wanting to be caught watching. She washes her face and puts on pajamas and falls to sleep in her large, empty bed.


	3. Chapter 3

Conference room. Ten AM. Emily is used to the routine by now.

“Metro police have requested our help,” JJ says, handing around photos. “They’ve had two rather unusual murders. The second victim was just discovered this morning, and the first was a week ago, but they didn’t want to waste any time.”

“I’ll say,” said Morgan, raising his eyebrows at the photos.

Emily looks down at her own photos as JJ describes the crimes. “The first victim is Rose Mullenax, thirty-five. She’s the CEO of a smallish import company. She was found last week in an empty lot, posed with all her limbs stretched out. The skin and flesh of her chest appears to have been peeled out, layer by layer, and then the ribs cut away to expose the heart.”

“God,” Emily says, horrified. “Was she still alive while this was being done?”

JJ nods. “The ME thinks so. There are no signs of other trauma, except for rope burns and bruises on her wrists and ankles. It’s possible that the unsub stabbed her first, piercing the heart, but the ME is pretty sure that the surface cuts were done first.”

“So where is the heart?” Rossi asks.

“That’s a good question.” JJ grimaces. “It wasn’t found at the body dump site. There’s a lot of blood inside the body, indicating that the heart was pierced at some point, but the organ itself is gone.”

“And the other murder was similar to this one?” Hotch asks.

JJ nods. “Exactly the same, except that the victim is male. Dustin Hibbits, forty-one, a successful painter. He was posed in the same way, has the same rope burns and bruises, and had the skin peeled away and the heart missing in the exact same way.”

“No other signs of trauma on either of them?” Morgan asks, frowning as he flips through the photos.

“Not as far as they can tell.”

“So the question would be, how is he subduing them?” Emily says.

“I think the question is what’s he doing with their hearts,” says Reid.

“Could be for cannibalism,” says Rossi. “Could be a sick trophy. It’s a strange trophy, though. He’d have to get it preserved pretty quickly, I’d think.”

Hotch nods. “Rossi, why don’t you and Emily talk to the ME? I’ll go with Morgan to the dump site. Is it the same dump site?”

“No, two different abandoned lots,” says JJ. “The first one, where Rose Mullenax was dumped, was pretty filthy and overgrown, and the ME estimated that the body was not found until at least twelve hours after the body was moved there, based on lividity. The second lot was much emptier and cleaner. I think he wants the bodies to be found.”

Rossi nods. “These aren’t dump sites. They’re display sites.”

“We’ll go to the second dump site, then,” says Hotch. “There must still be cops there. Reid, you get started with a geographic profile. There should be at least four relevant points, correct?”

“Of course,” he says. “Where they were abducted and where they were dumped—displayed, I mean.”

Rossi smirks at Reid’s self-correction. Emily hides a smile.

“And JJ, coordinate with the detectives and media. I assume they’ve been keeping this one quiet on purpose since I hadn’t heard about it before.”

She nods. “They were hoping it was just teenagers playing some kind of sick joke, and didn’t want to encourage attention or copycats, but with the second one it’s clear that this is a different kind of offender.”

“Well,” Hotch continues, “just see what they’ve let out and what they haven’t, and work with the media to do whatever you think is best. I don’t have to tell you how to do your job.”

“Of course not, sir.” She smiles. “And we’ve worked with Metro police before. That part, at least, should be easy.”

***

Rossi speaks to Emily as they’re on their way to see Metro’s medical examiner. “So how have you been holding up?”

“Oh, fine,” she says, knowing what he means. “I’m just glad it’s over. I feel like I got some closure, for both myself and Matthew.”

He nods, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “And your friend John Cooley? Have you seen him since that night?”

There’s a practiced casualness to his voice and she’s surprised. She doesn’t understand what it means, though. She’s used to being able to divine people’s motivations, but Rossi and Hotch are both too good at profiling for that—though usually, team members don’t try to hide anything from each other. His wariness makes her wary in return, though. She tries to inject the same casualness into her voice. “Actually, yeah, a couple of times. Catching up, you know. It’s nice to see a friend from the old days again.”

“Well. That’s good.”

He doesn’t sound like he means it. But she doesn’t press him, because she thinks the explanation will only be criticism. She’s not sure why, but she is sure she doesn’t want to hear it.

When they reach the medical examiner’s office both bodies are lying on cold tables, sheets draped over their lower halves. They have been cut open and sewn back together, the flaps of skin where the unsub flayed them neatly pressed back into place. “Can we see how the skin was peeled away?” Emily asks.

The ME, a quiet Asian woman, nods and moves to the man’s body, the newer one. She takes corners of flesh between the tips of her fingers and peels them back. The flesh was sliced in an X shape, one layer at a time, it seems; Emily watches in horrified fascination as the ME peels away each layer, two corners at a time. “Of course, the killer may have done them in a different order,” she says softly, indicating the corners.

“Of course,” says Emily, nodding for her to continue. There are seven layers in all before all the flesh is turned back, looking like a grotesque flower, to display the empty space where ribs and a heart should be.

“Would the unsub have to have had medical training?” Rossi asks.

“Most likely,” the ME says with a nod. “It takes practice to cut through the layers of flesh one at a time without piercing or bruising the layer below. We practice on a lot of cadavers in medical school.”

Emily nods. “And the pieces of rib were missing from the body as well as the heart?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What about the blood? We were told that there was a lot in the body.”

“There was—more than two quarts. That’s what was inside the thoracic cavity, of course, not what was left in the veins and arteries.”

“And what does that tell you about the heart?”

“It was either pierced or removed while the victim was still alive. Without the heart itself, it’s difficult to say exactly what happened, but my guess would be that the killer pierced the heart and allowed the victims to bleed out before slicing through the veins and arteries.” She deftly points out the flaccid tubes where they should attach to the heart, their ends neatly sliced like cuts of meat. “It would be extremely difficult to slice them while the heart was still beating, especially since the victims would have been in a state of extreme arousal.”

“So you don’t think the victim was drugged or unconscious?” Rossi asks.

“No, certainly not,” the ME responds. “There’s a possibility that they were given a drug that metabolizes quickly, such as rohypnol, but if they were, it was completely out of their systems before they died. There are no other reasons to believe that they were unconscious, and based on the ligature marks—” She lifts the man’s wrist and points to the virulent bruising and rope burning there. “He must have been struggling rather hard.”

“Are both bodies identical?” Emily asks.

“Yes, other than the obvious secondary sex characteristics.” The ME leads them over to the female body and peels away the top layer of skin, revealing the fatty tissue of her breast. “There are seven layers of flesh on both of them, but there is a slight curve to the cuts here to accommodate her breast.”

Emily looks at Rossi and raises her eyebrows. “The removal of the heart could just be part of his MO, but the seven cuts is a signature if I’ve ever seen one.”

Rossi nods. “But if he’s taking the hearts for a keepsake… let me ask you this, Dr. Seery. Is the method you described really the best way to keep and preserve a heart?”

The ME smiled, a slight, ironic curve of her lips. “No, not at all. If I were to take a heart for a keepsake, I’m sure I would wish to cut out the entire muscle and retain all the blood. In order to do that I would tie off all the arteries before cutting, which our killer has not done.”

“How can you tell?” Emily asks.

She takes them back to the male body and lifts one of the arteries. “There’s a slight angle to the cut, and it’s sharper at the bottom. The killer simply chopped with a downward motion. There is no irregularity as there would be if the artery was tied off, and no signs of cauterization.”

“And he’s obviously not concerned about preserving the blood inside the heart.” Emily nods. “I’m thinking cannibalism is more likely, here, than preservation. If you’re going to preserve a heart as a trophy, you want the whole thing.”

“But cannibals are so rarely organized,” Rossi says. “And this guy is. Completely meticulous. I bet if we were to find the crime scene, there would be very little blood outside the body.”

“Maybe that’s his goal,” Emily suggests, picturing Rossi’s imaginary clean crime scene and letting her mind run in that direction. “That could be why he lets the heart bleed out while it’s still in the body—to keep the blood from getting all over. An obsessive-compulsive cannibal? Almost anything can be made to fit in with magical thinking.”

Rossi is nodding. “That’s a definite possibility. Especially with how perfectly identical both bodies are. And I’ll be he’s deliberately alternating between men and women.”

“We should see an unsub this delusional start to devolve quickly, though,” Emily says. “We can’t predict what he’ll do next.”

“You’re right. We should take a look at any body dumped in the DC area.”

The ME has just been looking back and forth between them, eyes wide. Emily smiles uncomfortably at her. “Was there anything else you wanted to show us?”

“Ah, no. I think you’ve seen everything relevant.”

“There weren’t any signs of formaldehyde on the body, were there?” Rossi asks. “Or anything else that might have been used as a preservation agent?”

“No.”

Rossi nods. “Another indication that he’s doing something other than preserving them. What about lividity? Were the bodies moved?”

“Lividity shows that the blood mainly settled in the back. From the patterns it does look like they were moved, but they were carefully kept on their backs the whole time.”

“Can you tell from the angle of the cuts whether the killer is right- or left-handed?” Emily asks.

“Right-handed, I would say.”

“And the victims, were they healthy? Any abnormalities?” Rossi asks.

The ME shakes her head. “Hibbits was a smoker, but had relatively healthy lungs. Oh—they both had small tears in their esophagus and stomach lining, and their stomachs were empty. It looks like they both vomited within two hours of their deaths.”

“Is there any medical reason for that?” Emily asks.

“Not that I could see. My guess would be that the killer forced them to so they wouldn’t vomit while he was torturing them.”

“That makes sense,” Emily says, looking at Rossi. “And it fits with our obsessive-compulsive theory.”

“Make them vomit where it’s easy to clean up.” Rossi nods. “All right, thank you for your help, Dr. Seery. We’ll certainly want your help again if there are any other bodies.”

The ME nods. “I’ll be here.”

***

_Father Paul Silvano is in his office looking at Father del Toro’s notes, what little he thought he might know about demons, when his phone rings. He picks it up without thinking. “Hello.”_

_“Father Silvano?” It’s a male voice, shaky, half-familiar. Coming from far away. “I don’t know if you remember me. This is Joshua Valentine. I—we met when I was working in Milan.”_

_“Joshua,” Paul says calmly. “Of course I remember you.”_

_“I hope you don’t mind me calling without notice. I just didn’t know who else to talk to, and you said you were available anytime I needed to talk…”_

_“And I meant it,” Paul says. “What is it, Joshua? Is your family all right?”_

_There’s a choked pause, and Paul knows in his gut that he’s guessed right, it is something to do with Joshua’s family. They were both young men when they met in Milan, Paul a young priest with his first congregation, Joshua a business-school graduate trying to take over his father’s business, with a beautiful wife and a baby on the way when they had moved to the States. Family was always the most important thing to Joshua._

_“It’s my son, Thomas,” he finally says, his voice thick with tears. “You never met him. He was born two months after we moved to Washington.”_

_“Please tell me about it.”_

_“He just returned from a trip to Europe—two months ago. It was a last-minute lark, you know how young men are.”_

_Paul makes an encouraging noise to keep Joshua talking, though he’s not sure he does know, really. But he senses Joshua is just afraid to go where he is going, and he won’t have any catharsis unless he pushes himself to go there. Paul is practiced in these techniques from his years as a priest. He wants to help Joshua—he was once a member of his flock, and so he still is. And right now he doesn’t really mind a distraction from the business of demons. Perhaps his son is seeing a girl his father doesn’t like. Paul has a great deal of experience counseling both children and parents in such a situation._

_“Well, now he—he’s different. He doesn’t… Father, I just don’t think it’s really him anymore. I don’t think Thomas came back from the trip.”_

_And instantly Paul’s senses are on edge, fully alert. Perhaps this is the key he’s been searching for. Perhaps this is no distraction after all._

_“I know it sounds crazy,” Joshua is saying._

_“No, not at all,” Paul says, interrupting calmly. “Joshua, I firmly believe in demonic possession.”_

_“You do?” And at last there’s hope in Joshua’s voice, not just the furtive sorrow there was before. “Then you can help us? Help my son?”_

_“Of course I can. Where in Europe did your son travel to?”_

_Joshua offers a list of destinations, but the last is Galicia, Spain. Paul writes down his name, and the name of his traveling companion, Patrick Cavanaugh. He presses his lips together._

_“Joshua, I’d like you to write down everything you can think of about your son’s condition—every way in which he’s different than he was before he went on this trip. Keep a journal. And then I want you to hang on, because I’m going to come to see you.”_

_“Oh, thank you, Father Paul. Thank you so much.”_

***

The team reconvenes in the BAU room. It’s the second case in a row where they don’t actually have to go anywhere, Emily notes in a corner of her mind. At least this time it’s an official case.

Emily and Rossi explain what they learned from the ME and describe their obsessive-compulsive theory. “I don’t know,” says Reid. “Cleanliness doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hoarders tend to be OCD as well.”

Emily nods. She probably doesn’t know half what Reid knows about psychological disorders, but she knows that much, at least. “Obsessive-compulsive might not actually be the technical descriptor for our killer, but I think it’s reasonable to say he has some kind of obsession with neatness and exactness.”

“It does add up,” Morgan says, nodding. “The perfect cuts, the blood inside the body, the vomiting beforehand. Maybe the unsub has a particular torture chamber that he doesn’t want to get dirty.”

“Or he can’t get it dirty,” suggests Reid. “Maybe he shares the space with someone.”

“I would think an unsub as disturbed as this would be unable to hide their pathology from a roommate or family member,” says Emily.

“Not if the family member is also pathological,” says Hotch. “Maybe there’s an overbearing mother figure—whether living or dead—who won’t allow the unsub to create a mess.”

“That’s certainly the same kind of thing we’ve seen before with Ed Gein and others like him,” agrees Rossi.

“Okay, even if we don’t say obsessive-compulsive, I think the neatness and cleanliness is an important part of the profile,” says Morgan. “The crime scene was certainly pristine. Pristine for an abandoned lot, I mean.”

“Both crime scenes were the same in that regard, from what the police told me,” JJ says. “No blood, no sign of any disturbance by humans.”

“It’s clear that he’s killing them in one place and then moving them to display them in the abandoned lots,” says Hotch. “Of course, then the question is, why display them?”

“For us?” Emily guesses. “For the cops?”

Rossi shakes his head. “That’s not enough of an explanation for me. We’ve got a delusional, obsessive unsub who’s rational enough at times to move two bodies without getting caught. Okay, we can assume that he’s moving the bodies to keep them from rotting and stinking up the place. But if he’s now thinking of them as trash, why the elaborate displays?”

“That could be another manifestation of the obsessive behavior,” Reid suggests. “Maybe he believes there’s some purpose to the display, or that this is just what you do with dead bodies.”

“This could be for whoever is in his head telling him not to make a mess,” says JJ. “Kind of a look, mom, I’m doing it right.”

Hotch nods. “That seems to fit. But we shouldn’t get too attached to a single theory. We don’t know if we’re going to find a new clue that will make us rethink everything.”

Emily sighs, resting her elbows on the table. “And of course when we say a new clue we mean another body. I hate that we have to wait until someone else is dead to find more patterns.”

“Unless Reid has deduced something brilliant with his geographical profile,” Rossi says, raising his eyebrows.

“I’m afraid not,” says Reid. “There aren’t really enough points to offer much information. The bodies were displayed in different parts of the same poor neighborhood, and the abductions both took place in the Georgetown district, also in different places. Based on these locations I would normally say that one or both of them is where the unsub is most comfortable, but obviously he’s very unlikely to be comfortable in both, and if one is outside his comfort zone, why does he use it?”

“The poorer area could be his comfort zone, and he just goes into Georgetown to find his victims,” Emily suggests.

Morgan shakes his head. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. These are low-risk victims. Why would he go to so much effort? What’s special about these victims?”

“And how’s he abducting them once he does find them?” Rossi asks. “The ME said rohypnol was a possibility, but there are no signs of physical trauma, and I can’t see either of these victims being comfortable enough with someone in that neighborhood to take a drink from them or follow them anywhere.”

“They could have some other connection to the unsub,” JJ says. “Something from their pasts.”

“Well, we’ve got Garcia on that.” Morgan calls her. “Hey, baby girl, you found anything yet? Of course you have. Want to come up and tell us all about it? Yes, precious.” He hangs up and nods. While they wait for Garcia to arrive, JJ changes the display on the plasma so it only shows the victims’ faces, and not their grisly wounds.

“I found one connection between the victims,” Garcia says when she arrives, throwing herself down into a chair. “Rose Mullenax, our first victim, went to a gallery opening that Dustin Hibbits was having. That was four years ago, but it’s possible they could have struck up a relationship since then. They didn’t live all that far apart, and neither were married.”

“That’s right, he was a painter.” Emily nods. “Maybe it has something to do with art.”

“Can you tell us anything else about the victims?” Hotch asks.

“Well, I haven’t finished digging into Rose Mullenax’s past yet. But apparently that gallery opening was Dustin Hibbits’s big break. Up until like a month before that he was just a bum. In and out of rehab, up and down—but mostly down—the financial scale, homeless a lot of the time. It started when he was in high school. Then all of a sudden, bam, selling paintings for tens of thousands of dollars to people like Rose Mullenax. And he’s been rich and successful ever since.”

“Rose Mullenax was successful, too, wasn’t she?” says Reid. “Did she have a drug history?”

“Not that I could find. She built her business right out of college, though. So she was kind of a sudden success too.”

“Interesting,” says Emily. “Could be a jealousy thing?”

“What if the victims and the unsub all knew each other when they were young?” says Rossi, tapping the table. “And now that the victims are successful and the unsub still isn’t, he’s killing them to gain some of their success? That would help explain the potential cannibalism, too. There’s a strong symbolic meaning there.”

“Okay, ew,” says Garcia, wrinkling up her nose. “Do I need to be here for the rest of this discussion?”

Morgan snatches up her hand and kisses the back. “We’ll call you if we need you again, beautiful. You get back down to your office and be brilliant.”

“Oh, I will.” Garcia gets up to leave. Emily smiles and waves at her as she goes.

“That makes sense to me,” says JJ. “I guess we’ll see whether Garcia comes up with any suggestions.”

“We’ve got a pretty strong picture here,” Emily says slowly. “But I really feel as though we’re missing something.”

“Well, if we’re right, this unsub will be devolving quickly,” says Morgan. “So we’ll probably get whatever we need pretty soon.”


	4. Chapter 4

It’s Tuesday morning, and John can’t figure out when or where to find the next names on his list. He’s not in any kind of hurry, though; he still has his other work to do, with Emily. And the worst that could happen is one of his victims will die before the time his master appoints for them, without the torture he is there to apply. He’ll be punished for that, eventually, but it’s not likely, and the punishment is nothing to fear.

He’s watched the news, though, and he knows the deaths are being investigated. Not too many details are out—he’s watched carefully enough to know exactly which ones—and they don’t say who is doing the investigating, but he recognizes the pretty, blonde FBI agent from Emily’s team, and he knows Emily must know about it.

Besides, he can’t resist an opportunity to strengthen his bond with her. He knows she’s strong-minded as an adult, so he has to work slowly, but that can be pleasant, too.

He stops to buy flowers on his way to Quantico and chooses a half-dozen blood-red roses with a single deep purple iris in the center. Romantic, but not overbearing, he hopes. When he looks at them all he sees is the end of innocent life and it pleases him.

The guards on the FBI building let him in—and why not? They’ve met him before. He’s harmless. He carries no weapons, only a bouquet of flowers for his girlfriend. When an overweight black man winks at him he winks back.

Emily laughs when she sees him. “John, what are you doing here?” She may mean it as a reprimand but she’s pleased. She takes the flowers. “Oh, you’re so sweet. I don’t have anywhere to put these, though.”

“I’ll get you a mug from the kitchen,” says one of her coworkers, a tall, skinny kid, and is up and running from his seat before Emily can argue with him.

John smiles and kisses Emily on the cheek, mindful of her coworkers, one of whom (Morgan, he remembers) is pretending to work but looking over his computer and smirking at them. “I just wanted to surprise you. I won’t stay long—I know you must be busy. But I thought you could use a break. You have a stressful job.”

Emily laughs again and shakes her head, holding the flowers close to her body. “You’re so sweet,” she repeats. “I guess I can use a little break. We have a tough case.”

“Oh yeah?” he says, pretending to be sympathetic, not betraying his interest.

The kid comes back with a mug full of water (it bears a picture of a cartoon moose). He sets it on Emily’s desk and the two of them maneuver the flowers into it. They’re really too long-stemmed to fit properly in the mug, but they get them balanced between the mug and the wall of Emily’s cubicle. Emily eyes them critically and shrugs. “I guess they’ll survive until I can get them home, at least. You should have told me to bring a vase.”

“Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise,” John says.

“I guess not.” She smiles. “So how’s your day going? Have you gotten a hobby yet?”

He laughs, surprised by her question. “I have, actually, though I’d prefer not to tell you about it until I have something worth showing. You’ll find out eventually, I promise. And you?” He nods to her desk, scattered with papers. “I don’t know whether this is a busy day or a slow one.”

“Busy.” She exhales and glances at her coworkers. “This is a tricky case. I think… oh, well, you don’t want to hear about it. But it looks like the killer is targeting successful people, so you might want to be careful.”

He frowns carefully. “I think I heard about that one on the news. Wasn’t the victim an artist? I’m just a janitor.”

“Actually, our theory is that he’s targeting people who started out deadbeats, but went on to be successful. It’s not concrete yet, but it’s something to work with.” She gives him an exaggerated wink. “Since I know how much of a deadbeat you were as a teenager, you might just be next.”

“Well, I happen to know an armed federal agent,” he says, keeping a straight face. “I might just have to keep her close at all times.” She laughs and he reaches out to squeeze her hand. “I’ll go, though, and let you do your work. Call me when you’re going home?”

She nods. “I will. You need your bodyguard.”

He squeezes her hand again and walks away. He doesn’t look back at her, but he hears the two men she works with start laughing, hears the expected “Emily, you didn’t tell us you had a boyfriend.” She splutters, then starts striking back at them with girls’ names, maybe women they’ve kept secret.

But she doesn’t make excuses for him and apparently she hasn’t told anyone. He’s not in far enough yet. That’s no surprise.

He walks out of the building, hunching his shoulders against the cold wind. He did learn something important today. They see the pattern already in the victims. Oh, the FBI is never going to think that the victims made deals with the devil—but if they get close enough to the real pattern, they might manage to stop him.

He’ll just have to work a little faster.

***

David Rossi sees, from his office, John Cooley arrive, bringing flowers for Emily. He stands and walks to the window, watching the scene with his arms crossed. He watches until Cooley leaves. Emily is smiling, and she keeps turning to the flowers, but her body language is stilted. There was something strange about Cooley’s face, too. He hid his emotions. He’s not shy about bringing Emily flowers at her workplace, though he looks like he’s trying to be.

Rossi leaves his office as soon as Cooley has left the building, and walks slowly down the walkway and the stairs, waiting for Morgan and Reid to stop ribbing her. She certainly doesn’t need support—she always gives as good as she gets. He just doesn’t want to interrupt their conversation.

Eventually, Morgan walks off to get a coffee from the kitchen and Reid and Emily get back to work. Rossi walks up to her, stands behind her for a moment, and says, “Everything all right, Prentiss?”

“What?” She looks up at him, startled, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”

He jerks his head toward the stairs, asking her with his eyes if she’d like to follow him. She shrugs and stands, but she touches the petals of the roses Cooley bought her before moving off.

The stairs aren’t completely private, but at least they’re far enough from any desks that if someone is going to listen to them, they’ll have to work at it. “So,” he begins, “you’re seeing that fellow now? John Cooley?”

She gives a short, self-deprecating laugh. “Yeah, I am. I guess it started out with me making sure he was okay after that exorcism, but then it just progressed from there.”

“It was him, wasn’t it? He was the father?” He keeps his voice soft and deliberately calm. For Emily’s sake, at least, he doesn’t want attention drawn to them.

She looks up at him through her long eyelashes—not coy, but definitely not straightforward. “What does it matter?”

That’s a yes, of course. “Are you sure you’re not just repeating what happened when you were teenagers?”

“Of course not.” She shrugs, irritated, like she’s trying to brush something off, but she doesn’t turn away from him. “We’re adults now. And everything is completely different. Though maybe that connection does have something to do with it.” Her voice turns thoughtful. “I mean, we do get along a lot better than I have with anyone else I’ve dated in the last, oh, several years. But maybe that’s just him. He actually cares about my needs.”

Rossi smiles and puts his hand gently on her shoulder. “Well, that’s great, Emily. In that case, I’m happy for you. Just, be careful, okay?”

Her eyes flash and she does turn away from him now, pulling away from his hand. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want to see you getting hurt again.” He’d be taken aback if he hadn’t been half-expecting this. Something about the way they are together… she’s more attached to him than she should be. Certainly more attached to him than he is to her. “I just want you to know, Emily, if you ever need somebody to talk to, you can come to me, all right?”

“All right. Thanks, Rossi.” But she doesn’t look straight at him, and she turns away abruptly, walking back to her desk without properly ending the conversation. Rossi leans on the railing with his elbows and watches her go, then quickly turns before she reaches her desk and hurries back up to his office, uncomfortable with his own interest. Emily is an adult. She can take care of herself. His mind should be in the case.

***

_An exorcism is an intense procedure. Father Paul has assistants, but he still enlists Joshua to help. He’s the one who called, after all. And he’s most likely to see—even sooner than Paul, experienced in forcing demons out of the human bodies they have stolen—when the demon leaves and his own son returns to them._

_Besides, he needs the assistants to be free to leave the room, to bring them water, to light the incense. He needs Joshua to keep up a line of communication with his real son, to exhort Thomas to fight, to drive the demon away._

_Paul shouts the words, again and again, throws holy water on the boy, waves holy incense through the air. He is strong and he is determined. He can fight this demon._

_But the demon fights back hard. It spits Black Latin at him, it contorts Thomas’s body in ways human limbs should not be able to move, it clings to the body with the ferocity of a lion and the tenacity of a snake._

_Paul is shouting Latin, attempting to drown out all sounds that the demon makes to try to confuse them, to turn them away, when he becomes aware that the demon is silent. Someone else is groaning. He holds his breath, lowers his gaze to see that Thomas has stopped moving._

_But there’s no joy, no exulting that he’s defeated the demon, that he’s won. And after a moment he realizes why. The groaning is coming from Joshua: “No… my son…”_

_His heart in his throat, Paul bends to touch Thomas’s face. It’s warm, but it is not the heat of life, and the flush that was on his skin has died away. Even as he rests his hand there, a chill creeps into the flesh. The demon has left the body and torn away life with it._

_Paul’s hand shakes as he presses his fingers to Thomas’s throat, not wanting to believe what he already knows. But there is no pulse. The flesh is clammy and still, the boy’s eyes rolled up into his head, his mouth open as though gulping air._

_Paul’s knees give out and he collapses, clutching the bed frame to support himself. “I’m sorry,” he gasps out, over the sound of his own heart thudding in his ears. “It was too strong for me. I didn’t know it would be so strong.”_

_“It’s not your fault, Father Paul,” Joshua says, though his voice is shaken with sobs, and Joshua’s kindness and strength is what heartens Paul and allows him to rise up again._

_He walks to Joshua and places a hand firmly on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I wish it could have been otherwise. But his soul is in heaven now. Better for him to be there and gone from us than here and tortured, out of our reach.”_

_Joshua nods, removes his glasses, and wipes his eyes on his sleeve. “I just wish I could have told him…”_

_“I’m sure he knows,” Paul says gently. “And you will join him in heaven one day, where you will have an infinite time to tell him.” He feels a wave of dizziness, and a blackness creeps in at the edge of his vision. He has been at this for days, and he is exhausted. “I must rest now. Go and be with your wife.” He finds just enough strength to help Joshua to his feet, then gestures urgently to his assistants. They catch him just before he blacks out, pain and exhaustion and grief overcoming him._

***

They find the third victim two days after that. His name is Brent Roessler and he’s like the others: not young, recently successful. He has a partner and two little girls. He’s a defense attorney who recently became a judge. Garcia has a lot to sort through—a gay judge comes with plenty of enemies.

This time the BAU gets to see the body. The appearance, this pale, thin man with his eyes wide and staring to the sky and his chest carefully peeled open, makes Emily feel sick and dizzy. Part of her knows that’s strange. They’ve seen worse bodies and it hasn’t affected her in this way. It hasn’t even affected her in this way when it’s been her friends in trouble.

But she’s afraid and she doesn’t entirely understand why.

She goes to the chain-link fence that surrounds the abandoned lot the body was dumped in (same as the others) and leans against the cool wire until the dizziness passes.

“Are you all right?” Reid asks, coming up behind her.

Her stomach twists—he’s startled her. And why didn’t she hear him coming? It’s not as though he was trying to sneak up on her. But she takes a deep breath and doesn’t vomit. “I think so. I just feel like we’re falling far behind this guy.”

“I’ll say,” says Rossi, who has also joined them near the entrance. Morgan and Hotch are still standing over the body, trading observations. “The victimology is all over the place. Race isn’t consistent, gender isn’t consistent, sexuality isn’t consistent.”

She shakes her head, tossing her hair back from her face. “One thing is consistent. They started out unsuccessful, and now they are successful.”

“Maybe the unsub believes he’s responsible for their success,” says Reid. “And they were ungrateful.”

“That makes sense to me.” Emily looks at Morgan and Hotch, who have just come up to join them, while the ME’s team gets Roessler ready for the autopsy. “Has Garcia come up with any connections yet?”

Morgan shakes her head. “She’s got her work cut out for her.”

Emily manages a smile, though the skin of her face feels tight. “Well, she’s cut out for the work.”

As the others walk away, back to the cars, she releases the fence. Only when she looks down at her hands does she realize that she’s been gripping the wire nearly hard enough to cut her hands. They’re scarred all over with red marks, like she’s been whipped.

Where did that thought come from? She shakes her head, shakes it again. She follows her team. They just need to solve this case.


	5. Chapter 5

_Emily and John are in the abandoned hotel they spend most of their time in these days. The rest of their group is in some other room, playing cards and talking. Emily isn’t sure how they got separated from the group. But she’s pretty high. It doesn’t really matter._

_John is behind her, arms around her waist, pinning her arms to her sides. She’s tense but she tries not to show it. She laughs and pulls her head back to smile up at him. She can’t focus right. His face looks strange in the light, the rays of the setting sun blocked by crumbling windows and faded curtains._

_They’re in a room that still has a bed in it, though it’s been stripped of bedclothes. John is walking her toward it. Her mind suddenly snaps into place, realizing why he’s brought her here, but her body is tingling all over, like it’s already known. And why shouldn’t it? John’s the coolest guy she’s ever known and she can’t believe she was lucky enough to get invited into his group, to hang out with the best friends she’s ever had. Which isn’t saying much, because she’s always had the hardest time making friends. It’s amazing that John likes her._

_He likes her. She didn’t know that before. She always thought Matthew… but Matthew doesn’t matter now, not when John is pulling her down to this empty, dusty bed, kissing her lips, running his fingers through her hair (recently cut short over her mother’s protests)._

_And he’s on top of her and he’s pulling her shirt off and he’s unclasping her bra like he’s done this a hundred times, and why shouldn’t he have? But he likes her, and she wants him to keep liking her, and his hands on her still-growing breasts are warm and tight and turn the tingles into electricity all over her body._

_When he goes inside her it hurts, and she tries to hide it, biting her lip to keep from crying out, but he’s nice about it, holding her tight and holding himself still until she’s able to relax, then moving inside her and it’s not like she imagined but still it feels pretty good. As he shifts her hips to drive deeper into her, she thinks maybe she should have asked if he has a condom or something, but what if that made him get mad at her? She just wants him to keep liking her._

_Then he grunts and spills inside her and she can’t help wondering, was that it? But it must be, because he’s standing up and pulling up his pants and telling her they should get dressed and get back before the others notice they’ve been gone._

_And he leaves her alone in the room to get her bra back on, but he smiles at her before he walks away and that, she thinks, is everything she needs._

***

That night she calls John and he comes over right away. She shows him the marks on her hands, still fading, and cries into his shoulder for an hour. She confesses that she doesn’t know why this case is affecting her so badly, that she’s afraid, that there’s someone very evil out there and for once she isn’t sure she knows how to stop him. John listens without trying to solve anything, strokes her hair, is warm and solid and _there_. She tells him all about the case, hoping for some connection to appear in her brain, hoping that talking about it will spill some of the pain from her heart. And it does, a little.

And then he’s standing up and walking with her, taking her to the bedroom, arms around her waist and pinning her arms to her sides. She couldn’t push him away if she wanted to—except she knows, of course, that if she said no, that if the protested in any way, he would stop. This is John, after all, the coolest guy she’s ever known, the best date she’s ever had. He would listen. He cares about her.

And she wants this so very badly. She’s hungrier for it than she even knew. She’s been so lonely. She hid it from herself, and she did a good job, because she’s good at hiding things within herself, but what happened to Matthew tore it open. And now having John here, kneeling over her, pulling her shirt over her head, maybe that’s filling it up.

His lips are on her neck, and it fills her with electric sparks. She grabs him by the back of the neck, digs her fingernails in because she doesn’t want to let go of him, and his moan in response warms her all over. He presses himself against her, she feels his thin body, his hardness. She shifts her leg against it and he moans again.

When most of their clothes are off—she’s sitting there in socks and a bra—she pushes him away for just a moment to go in her bedside table drawer. She has to push aside her gun, and she almost laughs at herself for how hard it is to find the condoms, how long it must have been, but then she finds one and pushes it toward him and smiles. He does laugh as he takes it. “Don’t want any more mistakes.”

“No,” she says, and pulls it out of the wrapping and slides it onto him with her hands and her mouth. He gasps and bucks into her and she pulls away, eyes sparkling, teasing.

He reaches around her and unclasps her bra and throws it to the side, then rolls his hands over her breasts, firm and caressing. He opens his mouth for a moment as though he’s about to say something but he doesn’t. Instead he bends down and sucks a nipple into his mouth, almost hard enough to hurt, tearing her breath out of her in a shuddering cry.

He reaches down and presses his thumb against her clit, sending a wave of warmth through her body and making her collapse onto the bed, the strength gone out of her torso. His smile is wicked. She pushes her hips up toward him, wanting him inside her, wanting the emptiness to go away, but he stares at her face, his eyes all pupil, and keeps rubbing her clit until she comes and shrieks and thrashes on her bed. Only then does he push inside her, and there’s no resistance at all because he’s made her slick and wet as a goddamned waterfall.

He holds himself still there for a moment, while she clenches around him, completely uncontrolled under the waves of her body’s pleasure. Then he takes her hips in his hands and shifts her so he can push deeper inside her, and she grabs back onto the back of his neck, and they move together for what feels like infinite time before he comes with a grunt, throwing his head back so her nails dig even deeper into his skin.

He pulls out of her after a moment, throws the condom into the trash, and curls up next to her on the bed. They’re both sweaty and breathing hard and she thinks she’s drawn blood on his neck, and though her body still tingles with pleasure she still feels incomplete. But John is here and he’s holding onto her and that, she thinks, is everything she needs.

***

David Rossi walks into the church, sits on a bench, and waits for a few minutes, his head up, his hands clasped in his lap. He thinks he ought to pray but no prayers come to mind. He knows words, he knows feelings, but today he can’t summon them up.

But he doesn’t have to wait long. Jimmy appears within a few minutes, probably alerted by the sound of footsteps in the sanctuary. Rossi’s heart swells when he sees his old friend, though for once he thinks it might be due to the sight of the priest’s collar rather than the familiar smile.

“David!” says the priest. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

He stands up and they exchange a hug, a clap on the back. “Neither did I, Jimmy,” says Rossi.

“You look troubled, my son. What can I do for you?”

They sit down together even as Rossi snorts at the “my son.” Jimmy is younger than him, if only by a month. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“And which thing that I said have you been thinking about? I say a lot of things.”

“That you do.” Rossi crosses his legs. “But this one was recent. You said we invite evil into our lives. Make ourselves vulnerable.”

Jimmy nods. “I worry about you. I pray for your soul every day.”

“And I appreciate it,” he says sincerely. Even if he’s not sure he believes—though he knows he believes in _something_ —he appreciates his friend’s genuine concern for his well-being, spiritual or physical. “But it’s not me I’m worried about today.”

“Your friend Emily.” It’s not a question. Priests are profilers, too.

He exhales hard. “She’s been different these past few days. I don’t think it’s grief. She says she feels closure over her friend who was killed, and I believe her on that.”

“And what don’t you believe her about?”

“It’s hard to pin down.” Rossi realizes he’s twisting his hands together in his lap and moves them to his knees, forces them still. “She’s seeing a new guy—one of her other friends from when she was a teenager. Silvano went after him, too, but we got there in time. I think they’ve rekindled an old romance.” He won’t share Emily’s secrets, not even with a priest.

“Nothing suspicious about that.”

“No. But I don’t like him. He looks like he’s lying all the time, and he showed up at the office a couple of days ago, bringing her flowers, but it was like… well, he reminded me of a lot of unsubs we see.”

“The killers,” Jimmy says, with a nod of encouragement.

“Yeah. It’s a common part of the pathology, to want to be part of the investigation. And I felt like that’s what he was doing—just coming to find out how the investigation was going. I don’t know why.”

“Your instincts are usually correct. Did you check up on him?”

“Yeah.” He sighs again. “I had Garcia check him out. She just thought I was being overprotective, and I was happy to have her think so.” He smiles at the memory. Garcia’s eyes sparkled as she teased him about feeling paternal toward Emily, or maybe, as she suggested, not paternal at all. He just smiled and didn’t deny anything. “But she couldn’t find any connection to the victims or anything else. In fact, he kind of seems like a deadbeat. He works part-time as a janitor and lives off his inheritance.”

“If she’s dating him, maybe that’s all you’re worried about. A driven, professional woman—whom you care about—dating a deadbeat.”

“Maybe.” He shakes his head and spreads his palms out in a gesture of defeat. “And if her attitude lately is because of him, I’d like to get them to stop dating as soon as possible. But I just don’t know.”

“And what’s her attitude been like?”

He realizes, when Jimmy turns his words back at him, that he does sound like an overprotective parent. He looks at the priest out of the corner of his eye, lips twisting, but Jimmy is just sitting there with one hand on the back of the pew, leaning forward slightly, in an attitude of complete attention. He’s just there to listen, and Rossi knows that he’s good at it.

“When I asked her about dating John, she got defensive—well, not exactly defensive, not until the end of our conversation. But she kept trying to turn aside my questions, and she doesn’t usually do that.” He leans back, staring at the high ceiling, trying to order his thoughts. They seem even more jumbled than usual lately. “She’s a very straightforward person, Emily. I mean, she compartmentalizes, but she hates lying or hiding anything. I can’t believe she would want to hide this relationship from any of us and yet that seems to be exactly what she’s doing. And then today.” He stops, trying to figure out how to explain it. “We found the third victim in this case we’re working. And like I said, she compartmentalizes. Normally the bodies don’t bother her—and we’ve seen crime scenes that were much more gruesome than this. But the blood drained out of her face. It was like she was terrified.”

“Does she believe she may be targeted?”

“No, I don’t believe she does. Why would she? She doesn’t fit the victimology—it’s all over the place anyway. She’s within the age range, but that’s all it is, a range.” He pauses. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be rehashing this with you. This is work.”

Jimmy shrugs, spreading his hands wide. “Talk about whatever you need to talk about, David. I’m here to listen.”

“Yes, I suppose you are.” He purses his lips. “Well, like I said, she seemed scared, and she was definitely more easily startled than usual. It was like the body reminded her of something she didn’t want to face. But she didn’t say anything about it.”

“Did you ask her?”

“I tried, after we were back at the BAU. But she didn’t even look at me. It was like she didn’t hear my question.” Her face had been so white. She walked past him like a ghost. He forces down a sudden surge of bile. And why should the memory of Emily’s wide-eyed face make him sick?

He finally turns to Jimmy, looking at him like a friend instead of like a priest. “I’m done with the talking part. I’ve said everything that I have to say. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Jimmy drums his fingers on the back of the pew for a few moments. “But I think it’s likely that her strange behavior is a combination of grief and perhaps this rekindled relationship. You should keep up communication with her. Not that I think you’re likely to stop—but make sure to talk to her every day, if you can.”

Rossi nods slowly. That’s easy enough, but of course Jimmy means about things other than the case. Still—not exactly a hardship. He cares about Emily.

“And there’s one thing I think I ought to tell you,” Jimmy says. He pauses long enough to make Rossi frown, then continues, “I’ve received communication from your killer.”

Rossi feels the blood drain from his face, but before he can ask any questions, Jimmy waves away his words. “Not in this new case you’ve been talking about. The priest. Father Paul Silvano.”

Rossi groans and leans back in the seat. “Is he still going on about demons?”

“I’m afraid so. And it seems that the punishment that the Vatican deemed appropriate didn’t help—he has no more duties, so I suppose he has all the time in the world to spend thinking. He truly believes that there are still demons in the DC area and fears for the innocent here.”

“And you take him seriously.” Rossi doesn’t have to say it as a question. He can decipher tones of voice, too.

“Yes.” Jimmy sighs. “He’s very sincere, David. And you know my beliefs on evil. And I know they’re not different from yours.”

“Has he contacted other priests in the area?”

“Yes.”

“Could he be trying to mobilize others to finish the murders he began?” Rossi leans forward, gripping his knees with his hands. He wants to shout at someone, to get up and pace, but that’s not going to help in this situation.

“He’s not suggesting anyone kill—in fact, at this point he’s not even suggesting exorcisms. He just wants people to be wary. I think he truly believes that he’s working for the protection of the innocent.”

“Of course he does.” He considers arguing, then changes his mind. “How is he communicating with you? Through e-mail?”

“Letters. He seems to be the low-tech type.”

“Do you think I could take a look at the letters? Profile them?”

Jimmy stares into his eyes for a long time, then nods and stands. “Wait here.” He goes off to his office, and in a few minutes returns with several folded papers in his hand. “There are three letters. I haven’t responded to any of them.”

Rossi nods and stands to take them. “I’ll return them when I’m finished. If I write to the Vatican to recommend a course of treatment for Silvano, may I mention your name?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

Rossi nods. “Well, thanks, Jimmy. For everything.”

“You’re welcome, David.” The priest puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “I’m always available. Whenever you need me.”

“I know.” Rossi leaves with the letters in his pocket.

***

That night Emily feels sick and nauseated even as she sleeps. She thinks she has nightmares, but in the morning she can’t remember them. She lets John sleep, feeling a moment of envy for his steady, smooth breathing, and goes back to work.

They talk over the profile again and again, rehashing it in every way they can think of, looking at new angles. They give Garcia something new to search for every twenty minutes, suggest new angles to the police walking the streets, hold a press conference (well, JJ holds the conference), give out more evidence. It makes no difference. They can’t find this killer. There are no connections between the victims however deep Garcia digs.

Hotch sends them home with orders to rest and keep their cell phones on. Emily returns to her apartment with a heart black and filled with despair.

It lightens, though not entirely, when she walks into her apartment and at the end of the hall there’s John, sitting in pants and no shirt and watching television on her couch. She laughs breathlessly—breathless because for the half-second between seeing a man on her couch and recognizing him her fingers reached for her weapon. “You shouldn’t lie in wait for me like that,” she teases, doing her best to make light of her own instinctive reaction.

He turns his head and grins at her, and her stomach flutters. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” he says, patting the couch next to him.

She moves closer but doesn’t sit down yet, slowly shedding her coat and work things. “You could have gone home.”

“Why?” He shrugs. “Everything interesting is here.”

“You didn’t even change your clothes.”

“I ordered Vietnamese food. We don’t have to go anywhere at all.”

She smiles and shakes her head at him. “How did you know when I would be home?”

“I didn’t, actually.” He makes a wry face, twisting his smile to the side. “I just ordered a few minutes ago. I thought it would be here and I could have it set up on plates and candles lit for when you arrived.”

She sits down next to him and rests her head on his shoulder. “I don’t own candles.”

“No candles?”

“No. You would have had to go out.”

He shrugs with the shoulder she’s not leaning on. “Oh, well, so much for that idea then.” His hand reaches down to tangle through her hair. “I can still set up a nice, romantic dinner, though. I bet you have some great wine.”

“You might have to put on a shirt to do that.”

He laughs and kisses her forehead. “You love it.”

She isn’t sure she would put it quite that strongly. But she does enjoy having him around.

A moment later he gets up and starts looking for the wine. She gives him directions, still lying on the couch, and by the time the food arrives he has set up the dining table rather nicely with a glass of wine for each of them and napkins folded into flower-like shapes. When she raises her eyebrows at them, he explained that he worked as a waiter in an upscale restaurant during college. She nods, understanding. She’s never been good at the napkin shapes herself.

Dinner is lovely, though more for the company than the food. She is not surprised when John rinses the dishes and leaves them in the sink, saying they can wash them later, and takes her hands and tugs her toward the bedroom.

She has been ordered to rest her mind, after all. And maybe she likes John’s company more for his mind than for anything else, but the sex is pretty great. She lets herself dissolve into his arms.

***

When Emily is fully, firmly asleep, John dips his finger in his own semen and traces a symbol over her belly, lingering on the little scar.

It’s not necessary, of course—he didn’t use it for any of the men he worked with in Galicia. But it’s easier, for the one who is entering, to have a homing device. It helps them find their way.

And for a demon, what the adversary calls “sin” is always a beacon.

He goes into Emily’s bathroom, finds a razor, and returns to the bed to cut lightly between his toes with it. When the pain resolves itself into a mental link to his master, he sends a short message. _She’s ready. Send someone._

He watches as Emily stretches out straight in the bed, then curls in on herself, whimpering softly. She’s still asleep, but her eyes are tightly squeezed shut. She grits her teeth, fighting.

He gently moves a lock of hair off her damp neck, then rubs the tense muscles there. She relaxes slightly. Fighting will—should—only make it take longer, but he wants to make sure the possession takes.

Finally, with a spasmodic jerk, she stretches out again and all her muscles relax. Her lips stretch out into a smile. He smiles, too, at the sight, and kisses her forehead before leaving her there.


	6. Chapter 6

There’s something in Emily’s head.

It’s as though she’s observing her own body. She can see through her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her skin… but her body does not obey her mind’s commands. Her mind is locked up in its own section, away from any connection to her body, away from whatever _is_ there, controlling her movements.

But at least it’s not controlling her thoughts.

There are no walls to this prison, and yet it is nothing but walls. It is infinite space and yet it is confining and there is nowhere for her to move. But she cannot find the edges. She can run and run and not escape, not hit anything, but the moment she stands still she cannot move, cannot breathe, cannot even blink her eyes.

Something else blinks her eyes for her.

She watches and tries to figure this out as her body goes through the motions. It showers; there’s something sticky on her belly, but that’s quickly washed away. It eats cereal dry out of a box. It cleans her gun, and the very sight of her own hands reaching without her volition for her weapon would make her break out in a panicked sweat if her sweat glands were still connected to her thoughts.

It goes through her papers. It opens her safe. She’s terrified and she can’t breathe (and yet she can’t stop breathing, slow, measured breaths as though there’s no adrenaline coursing through her veins, because they’re not, they aren’t connected to her mind) and she doesn’t want to open the safe. She doesn’t want to tell _it_ , whatever it is, the combination. But whatever it is reaches into her mind and plucks the numbers out, leaving a burning pain and a gibbering fear in its wake.

It had to come from somewhere, get in somehow, to reach her. But when she tries to follow it out she can’t move, and she can’t even see or hear or feel for a moment until she stops fighting and accepts (or tries to accept) what’s happening to her, and then her senses return.

Her hands are rifling through all her old papers, her old things from her Interpol days. She doesn’t try to fight back a wave of revulsion, because it doesn’t show on her face, won’t make her vomit. Her emotions are no longer connected to her body.

Somehow that thought brings her peace. Because she’s always been able to wall away her emotions from her body. This isn’t so different—even if there is something in her head, trying to learn about her, trying to be her.

And in a rush she understands.

***

That evening John comes back. He smiles when he sees her. He speaks to her in another language.

For a moment she’s panicked again, wondering whether she’s stopped being able to understand English—or is this Italian? And then she realizes that she might not speak the language, but she knows it. This is Latin. Old Church Latin.

Her body is responding in the same language. They are laughing. They kiss and laugh again.

The feel of John’s lips against her own is so familiar and yet terribly alien at the same time. Because she thought she understood before, but she didn’t. Not until now.

Yes, she has been invaded by a demon. Yes, Father Silvano was, possibly, right. Perhaps this same thing happened to Matthew as well. Perhaps he is truly in a better place now (though she doesn’t know what that place might be—but she is no longer willing to dismiss the idea that there may be a place).

But this didn’t just happen. It’s not because she had an abortion or because she did drugs as a teenager or because she slept with a terrorist and put him in jail. It’s not because she works with killers every day and does her very best to get into their heads.

It’s because of John, and that very thing sends her reeling in shock.

She sorts through her emotions while her body chats and laughs and makes up its face more heavily than she ever does. Betrayal. Astonishment. Hurt. Anger. Hatred. Fear.

Plenty of fear.

The thing using her body puts on her coat, then stops by the door and seizes her mind again. She doesn’t know how to stop it, but she’s going to damn well pay attention this time. She can almost see what it’s doing as it forces her to give up the code for her alarm system. She tries to follow it, but finds the way locked again.

When they are outside and the door is locked the entity frowns and says something to John. Emily can’t pick out the Latin (and maybe it’s not quite Church Latin after all, because she can’t find the roots of Romance languages in the quick speech she’s hearing), but it doesn’t sound as happy as it was before. John shrugs and says something back, not seeming concerned, and they go on their way.

But where are they going?

They get in John’s car and drive uptown, to a really nice area. Then they park and wait for a while. Emily is on alert, straining all of her senses, looking for a chance to tell someone who and what she is. But it’s dark and though people are leaving a party in ones and twos, no one stops to look at the car the two demons are sitting in.

Until a woman steps outside and stops to talk to the host standing inside the door, and Emily feels her body tense. Instantly her eyes snap to the woman’s face and clothing, though she’s some distance away. She’s trained in observation. She will remember this woman if she can do nothing else.

The woman is middle-aged, maybe early fifties, with faint lines by her eyes and hair lightly streaked with grey. She’s dressed nicely and richly, and could pass for any of Ambassador Prentiss’ friends, though Emily knows she isn’t. She wears a dark blue wrap dress, a diamond necklace, black pumps. She wraps a heavy black coat with what might be real fur trim over her shoulders and pulls black leather gloves onto her hands.

Once the woman is walking down the steps of the palatial house the partygoers are exiting, the thing in Emily’s body gets out of the car and shuts the door quietly. John stays where he is. (Should she be thinking of it as not John, something in John, like this demon is in her? Is there a difference? How long has the demon been there, and has she ever known John? Is it really because he opened himself up to Matthew?) “Oh my god!” the thing shrieks, and Emily is startled, nearly thrown off her fierce concentration on by the use of English at last. “John, John, are you okay?”

She sounds a little bit worried, but she’s not really worried. John is leaning with his head turned to the left and leaning on the steering wheel, as though he’s passed out, but his breathing is harsh and rapid. “Oh my god!” the demon shouts again, and Emily wanders why until she runs up to the middle-aged woman, hands held out, frantic. “Please—can you help me? I think my boyfriend’s sick! Please!”

“Oh god, of course!” says the woman, eyes wide. They’re blue. Her hair was once light brown, though now it’s mostly gray. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“I don’t know, he just suddenly passed out—” The demon is giving a pretty good show of being terrified. She opens the door and he slumps out.

“Do you have a cell phone?” says the woman, bending down to touch John’s face. But with a quick movement John lashes out and grabs her wrist. Before the woman can react Emily’s hand is going over her mouth.

“Sleep,” breathes John in a harsh whisper, and the woman does.

Emily’s arms hold up the unconscious woman. John reaches down and pops the trunk, and between the two of them they carry her over (now entirely silent) and dump her in. There is twine in John’s trunk. He ties the woman’s wrists and ankles together, tight, impeding the blood flow.

Emily has no idea why they are doing this. But she knows it can’t be good.

They get back into the car and John drives them back to a familiar place—his house. The car is parked in a garage, and the two demons carry the unconscious woman through an underground door and into a basement. It looks empty at first, blank concrete, but there’s an industrial sink in one corner and a chest along one wall and there, in the middle of the floor, four spikes spread far apart.

 _No,_ Emily is saying in her head, _no no no,_ because she can’t say it out loud and she can’t do anything about it but she’s pretty sure she knows where this is going.

The demons lay the woman’s body down in the middle of the spikes. John goes to the chest while the thing in Emily unties the woman’s limbs and spread-eagles her. John returns with more twine and they tie each of the woman’s arms and legs to one of the spikes. Her head lolls on the floor, but she does not wake.

John says something in that strange Latin and Emily’s demon laughs. Then she says something else and he nods and smiles, responds, and then she’s getting up and walking away.

She goes up the steps, a different set of steps than the one they took down, and into a kitchen that’s familiar to Emily only in that she’s hidden herself in hundreds of kitchens like this in an effort to be alone or at least helpful while parties that are so boring they are hardly worthy of the name go on in the living rooms and dining rooms. This is a rich man’s kitchen. The demon looks through cabinets and finds a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

When she comes back downstairs with them John has laid down three knives—ordinary-looking kitchen knives, but they’re sharp—next to the unconscious woman and is in the middle of cutting the dress off her with a pair of scissors. Her shoes and coat already lie in a pile by the sink. He looks up at the approach of the other demon, smiles, and holds up the diamond necklace. Emily still can’t understand his words, but his meaning is clear enough: a gift. Her demon laughs and trades him the champagne and glasses for the necklace. While he opens the bottle and pours, she clasps it around her neck. It feels heavy and cold to Emily, as dead as its owner will soon be if she can’t do anything.

And she can’t. She’s tried to jostle the demon’s control, just make its fingers slip, anything, but there’s nothing she can seem to do. She’s almost calm now. The two demons sit together on the floor, leaning against each other, watching the sleeping woman, and drinking champagne, and Emily is putting her powers of observation to keen use. If she can’t do anything else she can damn well do that.

Finally the woman moves her head and moans, and the two demons laugh. “Wakey wakey,” says the one in Emily. She drains her glass of champagne and John hands her the scissors.

The woman’s eyes snap open. “Who are you?” she demands, but her voice is shaky, not strong. “What do you want? I have money. I can pay any ransom you’d like.”

“We know you have money,” says Emily’s voice. “And we know where you got it from.” She kneels down next to the woman and returns to the job that John was in the middle of when he was interrupted—cutting off her clothing. She slices the dress to pieces and strips it off, then goes to work on the woman’s underwear.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says the woman.

“It’s all right, Alisa,” says John in a soothing voice. “We know about the deal you made.”

“I didn’t make any deal,” Alisa whispers, but there is no conviction in her voice at all. She no longer believes she can persuade them.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” says the demon in Emily, tearing away Alisa’s underwear and tossing it into the pile. Now the woman is naked, pale, and shaking on the concrete floor.

“Actually,” says John with the tone of a patient teacher, “this is going to hurt her a lot.”

“Oh?” Emily feels her face stretching in a terrible smile. “Well, that will be more fun then.”

John returns to the chest and takes out two pairs of rubber gloves. He puts one on himself and hands the other to Emily’s demon. Then he picks up one of the knives.

Emily is calm. She was pretty sure she knew what was coming. But it still makes her sick when it starts, when John makes a careful, steady-handed slice through the top layer skin above Alisa’s heart and she begins to scream.

***

Emily spends the night a prisoner in her own body. She can only watch as the two demons torture and murder their victim, and burn her heart with some kind of hellish fire from their hands. And then it gets worse, because apparently the murder excites the demons, and Emily can feel every caress and every forming bruise as they fuck on the concrete floor. John has scars on his shoulders that she’s never seen before, and he leaves bite marks on her body that are going to take a long time to fade.

And then John takes Emily’s body home, and Emily’s demon goes to sleep in her bed, but Emily stays awake, trying and failing to take advantage of the demon’s unconscious state to find some way out of her mind.

They are both awakened by the cell phone ringing. Emily knows what it is instantly, and she suspects the demon does, too. The demon answers the phone with a crisp, alert “Prentiss.”

“Well, we didn’t expect this weekend to last.” Hotch’s voice is grim. “There’s been another murder.”

“I’ll be right in,” says the demon, and hangs up. She showers, dresses, and does her makeup. Emily isn’t sure whether to be relieved or terrified that she does it in exactly the same way as she normally does.

Terrified, she decides, because clearly the demon is finding it easier to get information about Emily from her mind, and that means there is much less of a chance that her team will notice that something is off.

She is the last one in. The demon has been taking its time. No one comments, though; Hotch just starts in on the explanation of the newest victim. Alisa Hieber, 52, heiress to a shipping fortune. Emily recognizes the name and the pictures. She’s spread-eagled just like she was in John’s basement, but in an empty lot this time, just like the others. She has so much more information now and she can’t share it at all. She can’t even blink her eyes of her own accord.

The sight of the naked victim makes her wonder, with sudden fear and hope, what happened to the diamond necklace. Then she remembers with hatred and despair that the demon took it off and left it in John’s basement, in the chest with the other torture implements. The demons are too damn smart. By the time the team gets into John’s basement, it will be too late for new clues.

Hotch sends Rossi and Morgan to profile the crime scene and Reid and Emily to talk to the victim’s husband. Rossi catches her before they split up and speaks quietly. “Sorry if this interrupted your weekend with your new beau.”

He’s not really sorry—and she wouldn’t be upset about it, normally, so it’s an odd thing to say. But his eyes are flat, measuring. He’s testing her somehow. “I don’t think that’s really your business,” says the demon, and twists away from him. Emily feels a surge of satisfaction for a moment. That’s not how she would respond, and Rossi should know it. But a moment later her heart plummets again as the demon hurries to catch up with Reid. She did react like that, didn’t she? Just a few days ago, when John came to the office.

John. She passes her desk with the roses in the mug, starting to wilt and curl. She longs to reach out and dash them to the ground, tear their petals off, and for a moment the fingers of her right hand twitch. She allows the hope to return. Maybe she has a chance after all.


	7. Chapter 7

Emily is acting even more strangely today, and Rossi is truly starting to worry.

He meant to tease her a little, as they often do to each other—and yes, it was also a test—when he asked about her weekend with John. Her reaction told him that she had been spending time with him, yes. But it also told him that she didn’t find him funny or trust him today.

And he doesn’t know why.

When the team gets back together to discuss their findings on the new victim, Emily is as competent a profiler as ever, but she seems stiff. Stilted. She’s letting Reid do most of the talking about what the victim’s husband told them, and while that’s not exactly unusual—it’s hard to have a conversation with Reid in which he doesn’t do most of the talking—it is strange that she doesn’t often come up with her own, separate insights. The world the victim lived in is the same world Emily grew up in; she should have a lot to say. But she doesn’t.

He tries to ask her if she’s all right again before Hotch sends them all home, but she just stares at him, tight-lipped, and turns away.

Rossi goes home, sits with a snifter of brandy, and thinks.

He’s read over the letters Jimmy gave him three times now. They ring with truth, and it disturbs him. The content is not the irrational ramblings of a man in a psychotic break or suffering from paranoid delusions.

Except for the parts about demons, of course. But Rossi can’t entirely discount them either.

Silvano seems to realize he has overreacted. He seems truly upset about the deaths of the three men he attempted to exorcise. It’s part of a psychopath’s makeup to fake sorrow and sincerity, of course. But they had never profiled Silvano as a psychopath.

Rossi does not drink any of his brandy. Instead he goes to see Jimmy and ask him for another favor.

***

The demon takes Emily’s body home and sits in front of the television, flipping channels. Emily is glad that they’re not seeing John or killing anyone else right now, but she’s ready to burst with anger and frustration. She wants her body back. She wants her life back. She wants her friends back. But this creature has taken it all away from her.

It dragged the profile out of her mind as it sat there and discussed the case with the team. She likes to think that she made it a little harder for the demon than the last time, but she’s not sure. She did her best to feed it the truth, too, about John and the kidnapping and the destruction of the heart, but the demon manages to skip those parts when it speaks.

Not that anyone would believe her about the command words and the hellfire. She wouldn’t believe it herself if she didn’t have the proof of being a prisoner in her own mind.

There is a knock at her door and the demon jumps. Obviously it isn’t expecting John or anyone else. Thankfully it’s still dressed. It pads in stocking feet to the door and peers out the peephole.

Emily feels a thrilling, electric jolt of fear and doesn’t know if it’s hers or the demon’s. Rossi is there, looking calm and serious, and by his side, his silver-haired priest friend. Emily remembers him from delivering the profile of Silvano. The demon might just recognize his collar.

But it knows Rossi, too, and it can’t keep them out. It smiles and unlocks the door, then opens it. “Rossi. And Father—” It pauses while it snatches the information from Emily’s mind. “Davison, right? To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Call me Jimmy,” says the priest, smiling. He holds out his hand. The demon doesn’t shake it.

“We just wanted to talk,” says Rossi. “Can we come in?”

“Of course.” The demon holds the door open for them. They walk inside.

She follows them in, turns off the TV, gestures to the couch. They don’t sit. She does. “Look, Rossi, I know you’re concerned about me, but I’m fine, really. You didn’t have to bring a priest.”

“I’m just here as a friend,” says Jimmy, though the presence of his collar tells Emily that’s not true. He’s not a bad liar, though.

“We just thought you might want to talk.” Rossi sits down in an armchair, spreading his hands in a conciliating manner. “No judgment. But I know you’re not fond of shrinks, and you might need to get some of your feelings out.”

The demon shakes Emily’s head, crosses her legs in irritation. “I’m all right, really.”

“Then you won’t mind a small blessing?” asks Jimmy.

She pulls back. “I’m really not a Catholic anymore.”

“Indulge an old priest, please. David gets blessings from me even though he’s lapsed. I care for everyone.” He reaches into a pocket and brings out a small vial of water. He wets his finger with it and reaches toward Emily. Her hand whips out, grabbing for his wrist, but he must have been expecting that because he’s faster. He touches her forehead and marks a cross with the cool water.

The demon screams, arching her back, crying out as though in horrible pain. But all Emily feels is water on her forehead.

Rossi has risen from his seat, eyes wide, hands reaching out for her. “Emily!”

“Be careful, David,” warns the priest. His calm, happy demeanor has faded and he wears an expression of fierce concentration. “You were right to bring me in.” He flicks more water at Emily. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—”

The demon screams again and spits words at the priest in that strange Latin. She starts to get up but the priest cries for Rossi to hold her and he does, though his eyes are wide and his breathing is harsh.

It’s an exorcism. It’s an exorcism but it’s not Father Silvano. She’s not going to die. Emily battles with rising terror and hope and pushes, pushes, pushes at her prison.

With her arms pinned Father Davison is able to wet his finger again and paint a bigger cross on her forehead with the holy water. Again the demon screams, again all Emily feels is cool water. He is chanting in Latin now, the exorcism ritual, and Emily feels warm and cool all over and pushes and pushes and pushes—

And then the screaming stops, and it takes Emily a few seconds to realize she can close her mouth, to realize she is sobbing and it’s because she is the one using her eyes now, she is the one using her mouth and her hands and her body. She goes limp under Rossi’s hand, chokes, sobs. The priest flings more holy water at her. “It’s okay,” she manages to gasp out, feeling as though there’s a ball of spikes in her throat holding back her speech. “It’s just me. It’s gone.”

“Oh, God, Emily,” says Rossi. He lets go of her wrists and wraps his arms around her body. She clings to him, never having thought she would do this in her life but wanting to feel his caring for her as though it is her only connection to life and maybe, right now, it is.

The priest takes two deep breaths, steps back, and collapses into Emily’s chair. Emily takes deep breaths herself, trying to control her sobbing, but she can’t, and maybe she doesn’t even want to because she feels more connected to her body than ever before—it’s a thrill just to feel the breath move in and out of her mouth and the tears creep from her eyes. Rossi is rubbing her back and whispering, “Shh, Emily, let it all out, it’s all right,” and that’s exactly what she needs to hear, and she sobs and sobs for what feels like hours.

When her breathing finally begins to steady, Jimmy lets out a breath and says, “That is the shortest exorcism I’ve ever heard of.” And they all laugh and Emily feels like floating.

“It wasn’t… there for very long,” Emily finally manages to explain. “Just… just yesterday morning, actually. Though I think he was getting me ready for it, or something, for the last couple of weeks.”

“He?” Rossi asks.

Emily’s pretty sure he already knows the answer, but she tells him anyway. “John Cooley. You were right. And if I’d been thinking straight, I would have known that.”

Rossi laughs breathlessly and rubs her back. He hasn’t let go of her and she hasn’t let go of him. “You don’t have to apologize.”

“I wasn’t,” she says, and they all laugh again. She finally feels safe enough to let go of Rossi, so they slowly and gently move away from each other, and when she doesn’t fall back into one little place in her mind she takes another deep breath.

She turns to the priest. “Father, thank you. I can’t thank you enough. How did you know?”

He shakes his head and gestures to Rossi. “It’s David that figured it out. He said you were acting strange. I had letters that Father Silvano had sent me, and when David read them he thought he was serious.”

She nods slowly. “I guess he was right, after all. I should find a way to apologize to him.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Rossi says firmly, putting a hand on her arm. “He shouldn’t have been killing anyone, no matter what evil they might have had inside them—not without a judge and a jury, that is. The question is, what should we do now?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She bites her lip and looks at him. “Find John and stop him. Before he kills again.”

“Kills?”

She’s forgotten that he doesn’t know what she saw. So she explains it, in as few words as possible, because the memory of her hands in the blood and her body on the concrete floor is still too horrifying. Neither man asks for more details.

“I don’t think we can bring any of that to a judge,” she finally says. “So I don’t know if we can get a warrant. But I know the truth.”

“You say there’s evidence in his house?” Rossi asks, hands clasped in his lap.

She nods. “I’m sure forensics can find something in the basement, even if he has cleaned it thoroughly, and the last I saw Alisa Hieber’s necklace, it was in that chest. But we’d have to get inside to find that.”

“Well, I’ve already asked Garcia to look into John,” he says. “But maybe she can look in more detail, find something we didn’t think of before. Do you know why he’s killing these people?”

“No. I didn’t understand it.” She thinks back, goes over in her mind what exactly the demons had said to the woman. “It sort of sounded like they were blackmailing her. John said he knew how she got her money.”

“A deal with the devil,” says Jimmy.

“It could be,” Emily says. She’s not willing to discount anything, not anymore. “But why kill them? Isn’t that what the devil wants?”

“Maybe their contracts are up,” says Rossi. “Do you think he’s planning to kill more?”

“I assume so. They didn’t act like they were saying goodbye.”

“Then we need to stop him before the next one.” Rossi takes out his cell phone and tosses it in his hand, thinking. “Do you think you could talk to him? Would you be all right with that?”

“I think so,” she says cautiously. Yes, the idea of speaking to John again fills her with fear. But she’s been afraid many times in her life, many times she thought she would die or kill, and she’s made it through. And she’s always been able to wall away parts of herself. As long as it’s voluntary, it’s almost comfortable. “But he might be suspicious. I don’t know that language they were talking in… it sounded like Latin, but it wasn’t.”

“Black Latin,” says the priest. “The language of demons.”

She looks at him. “Do you understand it?”

He shakes his head. “It’s not a sound human tongues should be able to make.”

“You’ll just have to say you’re with your team,” says Rossi. “That should explain anything else that makes it sound like you and not the demon. The demon would have to pretend to be you in front of the team, even if it’s talking to him.”

“But what do you want me to tell him?”

“Ask him to meet you somewhere. Come back and visit you at the BAU. Once he’s there we can get a confession out of him.”

She shakes her head, brushing back strands of hair from her face. “I don’t want to do that.”

“Emily, he’s a criminal.”

She sighs. “He might be possessed now, but he was my friend once. Can’t you do another exorcism? The case will be solved. The killer will just have escaped.”

“I don’t know,” says Jimmy. “Father Silvano couldn’t get the demon out of him.”

“He was interrupted,” she says. “And maybe he wasn’t so good at exorcisms anyway. He didn’t exorcise anyone without killing them.”

“I’m not exactly a professional exorcist myself. I could maybe find some…”

“Please?” she asks. He nods.

“Then where do you want to bring him for it?” Rossi asks. “We can’t do that in the BAU.”

Emily shakes her head quickly. “We’ll go to his house. He’ll let me inside, and then if something goes wrong, we’ll have been invited in and we can find the evidence.” She doesn’t want to think of it that way, but if there’s no more of her friend in John then he still needs to answer for his crimes.

“And if we’re successful and the demon is gone?” Rossi says gently. “Then what do we say to the rest of the team?”

“I don’t know.” She brings her hands together and rubs her thumbnails against each other until she finds a rough spot and worries at it. “Let’s just take this one step at a time.”

***

Emily stands at John’s door, face heavily made up, wearing a red T-shirt with a low neckline that she knows brings out all her best features. She lifts her hand, ready to pick at her nail, but stops when she feels Rossi shift behind her. She mustn’t let her nerves get the better of her. She just needs to do this and finish it.

She reaches out and rings the doorbell.

John answers after some time; he must have been in another part of the house. He’s dressed neatly in a black button-down and black jeans. His eyes widen slightly at the sight of her, but he smiles. He’s not expecting her, but he’s not going to complain.

She’s glad she’s doing this in person. The phone would be too impersonal. Right now she can look into his eyes and see the evil there. She wonders how she’s missed it before.

She leans against the door in a provocative posture, knowing the neckline of her T-shirt shows the swell of her breasts. This isn’t the first and she knows it’s not the last time she’s used her sexuality to misdirect. “Hi, John.”

“Emily. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She gestures at Rossi. “I’m here in an official capacity, I’m afraid.” She tries to indicate with her eyes that she wishes it were otherwise.

His smile widens. “I gathered as much. What is it? Can I help somehow?”

She nods, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “I’ve told you about the case we’re working on. Garcia found out that you know one of the victims, and we want to ask you about her. See if you can shed any light, figure out how the victims might be connected.”

There’s a flicker of fear in those green eyes. “Someone I know has been killed?”

“Can we come in?”

“Oh, yes, of course—I’m sorry, where are my manners.” He steps aside, holding the door open. He lets his fingers stroke down her arm as she passes. She controls her shudder.

Rossi enters, then Father Davison steps up to the door, and John stops him with one hand held out, not quite touching him. “Who’s this?”

“Jimmy’s consulting on the case,” Rossi says calmly.

“Don’t worry, he won’t try to minister to our souls,” Emily says with a laugh. The priest has refused to lie, but Emily has no such compunctions—not when it’s needed. She turns John with a light touch on his shoulder so neither of them is facing the priest, then gives a smirk and an eye-roll, hoping to communicate that the priest is nothing to worry about. It seems to satisfy John, because he shrugs and lets Jimmy in.

He clearly does not suspect that she has been exorcised, that she’s Emily again. So why does that make the fear in her gut coil tighter?

They go into his living room. Jimmy sits down, but no one else does. Rossi and Emily spin the tale they came up with before coming here, about John and Rose Mullenax having gone to the same school when they were younger. John keeps smiling, even while he denies it, says he doesn’t know anyone by that name. It’s half true, of course; they have no evidence that he and Rose Mullenax met before a few weeks ago. But Emily knows he killed her then.

They keep talking—Rossi’s a good talker when he wants to be—trying to come up with other connections, waiting for Father Davison to have an opportunity to make his move. But John never takes his eyes off the priest, not for a second. Maybe he’s not so trusting as Emily had thought he was.

Then, abruptly, John says, “I’m sorry, I’ve been a terrible host. Can I offer you anything to drink? Coffee?”

“Sure,” says Rossi. “Coffee would be great.”

“I’m all right,” says the priest, raising one hand lazily.

“Well, I could use some coffee, anyway.” John turns to Emily and quirks an eyebrow at her, inviting her to come with him to the kitchen. She smiles, as though delighted to find an opportunity to be alone with him, and precedes him in, swaying her hips as she walks through the living and dining rooms. She can only hope that this is the distraction they need.

They’re barely into the kitchen and out of sight of the two older men before she feels his hand on her ass. She laughs breathlessly and presses back into his touch despite every instinct in her screaming to get away from him right now. “You’re just insatiable, aren’t you?”

“Hey, you’re the one who came here.” His voice is a growl, and he presses himself against her, nipping at the side of her neck. She lets out a soft moan and grabs for his other hand. She hopes that, if Jimmy is paying attention, he won’t be too embarrassed by this display of sexuality to do what needs to be done.

John turns her around and presses her against the counter, his hands roaming over her body, his erection pressing insistently against her stomach. From here she can see part of the dining room, but if they’ve been followed, Rossi and Jimmy aren’t visible from here. “Oh, stop it,” she says, gasping when his finger pinches her nipple. “Really, they’re right over there, this is ridiculous.”

“We’ll be quick,” he says, pushing her legs apart with his knee. “They won’t notice a thing.”

“Oh, but that’s no fun.” She tries to put a purr into her voice, a promise of things to come. She fears what’s going into her voice is a frightened shake instead. She has to get him to stop, somehow, without making him suspicious. She’s dry as a bone despite his clever hands, because the demon that is John Cooley is the last thing that turns her on, and if he’s not distracted enough for an exorcism right now having sex with him in the middle of his kitchen isn’t going to help. They need to get back to Jimmy. But she can’t push him away, because there’s no way that other demon would have put up more than a token protest.

“Come on.” He rakes the fingernails of his left hand down the back of her neck, his right hand clumsily working the button of her slacks, trying to reach down inside.

“John,” she says, and knows instantly she’s made a mistake, even before she sees his eyes narrow and hatred spring up in them like a match touched to kerosene.

“You’re not her,” he spits, his voice low and cracked and mad. “It was that damn priest, wasn’t it? Well, if I can’t get her back with sex I’ll have to do it the other way.”

And before she can move his hands are around her throat and he’s squeezing.

She gasps for air, thrashes her body and claws at him, but without oxygen in her lungs she can’t make her limbs do her bidding, can’t get a purchase on his shirt or pull herself away from him. He’s so strong. He’s being foolish to do this with others in the house, but it’s hard to take comfort in that when his hands are around her neck and her vision is starting to go black around the edges. Her vision tunnels and all she can see is his mad, cruel eyes.

But then there’s a sound like an explosion, and she and John both fall, but it’s his blood that’s all over both of them, his skull that’s been opened with a bullet. And air is coming back into her lungs as she gasps and chokes for it.

Then Rossi’s hand is in hers and he’s pulling her to her feet. “I’m sorry, Emily,” he says, and for a moment she can’t figure out why. She shakes her head and makes for the sink. He helps her to it and holds her hair back as she vomits through her burning throat, then splashes water on herself to try to clean off her face.

“I’ll be all right,” she finally says, though it hurts to talk. “Thank you.”

“I really am sorry. If I had followed you sooner…”

She shakes her head and waves a hand at him, still bent over the sink. “You followed me. You saved my life, Rossi. I think that’s enough.”

“Will you be okay here for a minute?”

“Yeah.”

She feels, then hears, him walk away, then quiet voices and the front door opening and closing. When Rossi returns, he says, “I had Jimmy leave. It will be easier to explain us being here without getting him involved, and I don’t want him questioned.”

She nods. “Makes sense to me. What are we going to tell them?”

“Most of it can be the truth. He tried to kill you. They’ll find the evidence.”

“But for us being here. We’ll have to have an explanation for you coming too.”

“Right.” He leans against the counter. She can see him out of the corner of her eye. “I suppose the protective friend angle won’t fly with Hotch.” There’s an odd inflection when he says “friend” but she doesn’t have the energy to question it. “Why don’t we say he mentioned the name of one of the victims—it’ll have to be Alisa Hieber—before she was killed and you were suspicious? You came here to confront him and, because you’re an intelligent young lady, brought me as backup?”

She can’t help smiling at the compliment, though it hurts to smile, too. “That works for me.”

“Good, because I want to make sure you get to the hospital soon.” He takes his phone out and she hears it connect, then ring half a ring before it’s picked up. “Hotch?” says Rossi. “We have a situation here.”

***

Father Silvano reads the letter a third time, then sighs and puts his head down on his desk.

Maybe his superiors were right. All he needed was some rest. Some space to think and to write letters.

He lifts his head again and takes some time to pray for the poor young man who was killed. It isn’t the way he would have liked it to happen. All four of these men dying—no, that should never happen.

Perhaps it is a sign from God. No, there is no question. Of course it is a sign from God. He wants Paul to stop doing exorcisms himself. In fact, he probably shouldn’t encourage others to do so. He was not fully prepared and neither were any of the other priests.

Preparation. Yes, that is the key. He will learn, and he will teach, and in the teaching he will learn and so will others.

Education is necessary. He will become an educator.

And in that way, he hopes, he will be able to protect God’s world from those who seek to destroy it.

He kneels, crosses himself, and gets into bed. That night he sleeps well for the first time in months.

***

Hotch is not happy. But maybe the sight of her in a hospital with an IV hooked up to her arm and bandages on her neck makes him feel sorry for her, because he doesn’t yell and barely lectures her. He just tells her she was stupid to confront John (though he doesn’t say “stupid,” because he’s Hotch) and she tells him she knows and she’s glad and lucky she brought Rossi along.

And they’ve solved four murders, and the crime scene guys found a list of five names in John’s house, so it’s a pretty good ending. Everything’s above-board, with nothing to contradict their story, so even Strauss isn’t going to come down on them.

The whole team comes to visit her, of course, most of them bringing flowers. It’s a profusion of colors and styles that reminds her of Garcia’s office, which is pleasant, because none of them remind her of the roses that the demon brought her. Morgan whispers to her that he threw them out, and she smiles gratefully.

She’s tired before she expects it, though, and hears JJ and Garcia rushing everyone out as she closes her eyes and drifts off. When she wakes up, only one person is still there, reading a thick book that’s resting on his crossed legs. She thinks it’s one of his.

“Rossi,” she says, and smiles, because he’s here and because her throat hurts so much less. “You didn’t have to stay.”

He looks up and closes the book. “I couldn’t leave you alone.”

“I’m used to being alone.” It comes out more bitter than she intended.

He reaches out and covers her hand with his, smoothes the picked-over nails with his rough thumb. “You don’t have to be.”

She turns her hand over and twines her fingers with his. His touch fills her with warmth. He smiles, and she smiles back. And maybe, she thinks, that’s everything she needs.

For now.


End file.
